The B Corporation
Mike Hannigan and Sean Marx started a company with an unusual mission: donate all profits to charity. As they grew to sales of more than $26 million, Hannigan and Marx often wished for additional capital to help fuel that growth but stayed away from outside investors for fear of undermining their philanthropic mission. Now, they've found a solution to their dilemma -- writing their values into th... posted on May 21 2008, 4,188 reads

Memo to a Young Leader
"I spend a lot of time thinking and writing about the challenges of talented young people frustrated with life inside big organizations -- game-changers who spend much of their time questioning authority. In this post, I'd like to turn the tables and address talented young people who find themselves exercising authority: leading a project team, running a product-development group, starting a new b... posted on May 19 2008, 4,961 reads

Personal Finance for the Masses
It is a "well-established fact" that "a substantial proportion of the general public in the English-speaking world is ignorant of finance," writes Niall Ferguson, an historian at Harvard University, in his forthcoming book about the history of finance, "The Ascent of Money". He produces a long list of evidence to support this conclusion. According to one survey last year, four in ten American cred... posted on May 03 2008, 2,808 reads

A Teacher's Lessons for Business Leaders
Ron Clark used to be an elementary school teacher in North Carolina -- but after watching a program about a New York City school that had a hard time attracting qualified teachers, he decided to head to New York with the goal of teaching in one of its toughest schools. Clark eventually landed a job doing just that -- in Harlem. He asked if he could teach a class of fifth-graders who had been perfo... posted on Apr 16 2008, 7,415 reads

Laser Monks
In 2002, Bernard McCoy founded an online ink and toner business that today has grown into a multi-million-dollar operation, but contrary to the way most businesses work, his own salary hasn't increased in proportion to the company's profits. "I'm probably the worst-paid CEO in the country," he says joyfully. His annual pay? Zero dollars -- the same as when he started the business. McCoy is a mo... posted on Mar 25 2008, 3,101 reads

12 Principles of Spiritually Intelligent Leadership
"What makes a great leader? Some say it is the ability to give a clear sense of direction. Some, that it is the ability to make tough decisions. Others, that great leadership is the ability to command and control, or, conversely, to inspire loyalty in those led through strong emotional empathy. I think that great leadership depends primarily on vision--not just any type of vision, but one that we ... posted on Mar 24 2008, 9,780 reads

The Soccer Boy Effect
Brian Mullaney's epiphany occurred back in 1994 in Vietnam. He was traveling as a board member with Operation Smile, a charity that performed cleft-repair surgery on poor children around the world. In a small Vietnamese village near the Chinese border, there was one kid who played soccer every day with the volunteers; they took to calling him Soccer Boy. When the mission was over and Mullaney and ... posted on Mar 22 2008, 3,291 reads

Social Change through the Workplace
Perhaps it's no surprise that empowered, satisfied employees tend to live in open, peaceful societies. What's interesting is that research shows that improvements in workplace empowerment often usher in social changes. Author Gretchen Spreitzer, a professor at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business, examined survey data from 65 countries around the world, comparing detailed measures ... posted on Mar 04 2008, 3,352 reads

The Six Myths of Creativity
Teresa Amabile has been grappling with the question of creativity in the workplace for almost 30 years. She has collected nearly 12,000 daily journal entries from 238 people working on creative projects in seven companies in the consumer products, high-tech, and chemical industries. She didn't tell the study participants that she was focusing on creativity. She simply asked them, in a daily email,... posted on Feb 08 2008, 5,921 reads

The Neuroscience of Leadership
Managers who understand the recent breakthroughs in cognitive science can lead and influence mindful change: organizational transformation that takes into account the physiological nature of the brain, and the ways in which it predisposes people to resist some forms of leadership and accept others. Several conclusions about organizational change can be drawn that make the art and craft far more ef... posted on Jan 27 2008, 3,558 reads