Duncan Watts has a great blog post on HBR that talks about the Occupy Wall Street movement. Specifically, he has noticed how perplexed many of us are by the fact that the movement itself has no single, identifiable leader. How can it continue without someone to set a direction and lead the people there? Interestingly, [...]
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I suppose that sounds obvious, but when I talk to people about changing the way they lead and manage organizations, I’m not so sure it’s that obvious. Instead, there seems to be a default assumption that in the future, management will look roughly like it does today, except that somehow it will be better and [...]
Continue ReadingWhenever I get some time to think deeply about things related to the workplace, like how do we make work better, or what is leadership, or what is management, then I end up inescapably coming to the conclusion that is the title of this post: We have no idea what we’re doing. Sorry to be [...]
Continue ReadingSteve Drake pointed me to an interesting blog post based on some of the material from the most recent Steve Jobs biography. Apparently Jobs thought it was a problem when CEOs become too focused on sales: I have my own theory about why the decline happens at companies like IBM or Microsoft. The company does [...]
Continue ReadingI give credit to Shelly Alcorn and her Association Subculture blog for triggering this post. She wrote a post about “volume,” referring to a very cool video of George Carlin. Carlin talked about how, later in his career, he learned to “raise his voice”–not literally, but upping the stakes in his comedy. Elevating his voice. [...]
Continue ReadingI already did an overall recap post on the ASAE Annual Meeting over on the Common Thread blog with some big picture reactions to the event. Here I wanted to dig into some of the issues a little more deeply, and there’s one that I have been stewing over for a couple of days now. [...]
Continue ReadingTony Schwartz wrote a fantastic post on HBR today on Ten principles to live by in today’s complex world. All of them are spot on, so read the whole thing, but I’ll focus on one of them that jumped out at me: Emotions are contagious, so it pays to know what you’re feeling. I’ve been [...]
Continue ReadingI am not a fan of the idea of control. I actually hadn’t given it too much thought prior to a few years ago when the theme of “clarity over control” emerged as a part of the social media revolution. My post back in February 2008 on the “myth of control” probably set a record [...]
Continue ReadingThe economic news these days does not induce a lot of smiles. I was at a presentation last night given to members of one of the associations I manage about economic indicators, and the analyst joked at the beginning of his presentation that there was an 85% chance that people would cry during the presentation [...]
Continue ReadingThanks to everyone who came to my session at the AAFP Annual Leadership Forum to hear me talk about creating tomorrow's organizations today. Feel free to download a PDF of the slides. (UPDATE: I fixed the link. Sorry about that!)
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Jamie is a Vice President at MSP where he leads the consulting division. 
