Can balancing advocacy with inquiry be implemented at an organizational level? Turns out, you can. Roger Martin is one of the world's foremost experts on strategy and a former dean of the Rotman School of Management. He shares an example at P&G where giving equal importance to inquiry in| Leading Sapiens
Do you consider yourself an effective leader? What about parenting? When you think of getting better at something, what's your first instinct? Our default approach is to look outside for help. But an equally fruitful and often better approach is to look inside — the natural process of learning from our| Leading Sapiens
How do effective leaders maintain their composure when everything seems out of control? They’re adept at discerning what they can control vs what they can’t, and what they can influence. The circle of control, influence, and concerns (acceptance) framework or CIA — is a “leadership triage” tool that helps| Leading Sapiens
Organizational life can be a confusing muddle, especially if you are trying to get better at playing the game. Take the leadership genre for example. You might come across books that cover any of the following: power, building better teams, culture, emotional intelligence, war and strategy, psychology, authentic leadership, biographies| Leading Sapiens
The framework of ethos, pathos, and logos was developed in the 4th century BC by Aristotle. It’s a simple but also robust model for effective persuasion and communication that has withstood the test of time. And yet most leaders are either unaware or it, or don’t really know| Leading Sapiens
Transitioning into leadership roles can be especially challenging for experts/specialists. The domains of competence framework explains why.| Leading Sapiens
Changing/quitting careers in midlife is hard. A collection of 35 of the most useful frameworks when changing or quitting careers in midlife.| Leading Sapiens
Our habitual ways of looking at time in linear, spatial terms can limit us. Human time is different from mechanical clock time. Do we know the differences?| Leading Sapiens
Authentic leadership and time management - we don’t often see them in the context of each other. What's the link between authenticity and time?| Leading Sapiens
The ladder of inference is a powerful tool to make better decisions by uncovering hidden mental models and understanding how we reach conclusions.| Leading Sapiens
Mid career can be a dangerous time. What made us successful can also become traps that eventually sink our careers. Active inertia is one culprit.| Leading Sapiens
Deliberate practice is a proven research-backed framework to improve performance. Here's how you can use it to increase leadership effectiveness.| Leading Sapiens
Small wins and small bets can be an effective strategy instead of going for the big win. But there are several nuances that are misunderstood.| Leading Sapiens
What makes someone "leadership material"? This often depends on who's making the call and what their Implicit Leadership Theory is - we all have one.| Leading Sapiens
Leadership development is usually about positive abilities. Negative Capability is often forgotten but equally critical. What is it and what prevents it?| Leading Sapiens
Ever wonder why that particular initiative of yours never got traction? Organizational politics kills more initiatives than people realize, and happens both at leadership and individual contributor levels. Understanding some of the dynamics can help to better navigate the terrain. Three organizational layers and their experiences * The individual contributor: You| Leading Sapiens
The systems thinking iceberg is a useful thinking model for leaders when dealing with intractable problems that never seem to go away. Part of the challenge is what the model calls “events” — surface level issues that are constantly on our radar — which are essentially fire-fighting, but that never really address| Leading Sapiens
Why do we need props like vision, mission statement, and goals? Our orientation towards the past and future radically influences present actions.| Leading Sapiens
Most leaders tend to have a default go-to style with possibly another that they use in extreme situations. Each style has its own set of characteristics.| Leading Sapiens
Paradoxes are built into the nature of management and leadership. Understanding them beforehand can be extremely useful in avoiding frustrations.| Leading Sapiens
The "if...then" way of thinking about cause and effect is common in business. Circular causality is often missed in the decision making process.| Leading Sapiens
Our actions, and by extension performance, stem from thinking that is based on a set of hidden mental models. How do you uncover these mental models and change them? One way is to understand and practice the concepts of single-loop and double-loop learning. Professional sports teams use postgame films and| Leading Sapiens
Balancing the long term with the short term is an ongoing challenge for leaders. Peter Drucker addressed how to go about it in his writings.| Leading Sapiens
Excellence is more mundane than we think. Understanding its nuances increases our likelihood of success. Not doing so sets us up for failure.| Leading Sapiens
Most common discourse on mental models takes an additive approach. But this tends to be half-baked, often useless in practice. There is equal value, even more so, in a subtractive approach to mental models. The key is in understanding the difference between hard and soft mental models. How is the| Leading Sapiens
Jeff Bezos is one of the clearest thinkers in modern business. This article captures all his mental models and thinking frameworks in one place.| Leading Sapiens
In their book, Business Experimentation, Rob James and Jules Goddard highlight two approaches to strategy that are diametrically opposite to each other. The lone big bet is still the norm First is the traditional big bet approach characterized by centralized once a year planning, while the second is a culture| Leading Sapiens
Is chess a good analogy to describe decision making and strategy in organizations? Tetris might be a more fitting analogy.| Leading Sapiens
Understanding the different types of goals can dramatically increase how effective we are at goal setting. It's more than the generic SMART goals framework.| Leading Sapiens
Leaders are paid to think clearly. And a big impediment to clear thinking is what CBT/REBT calls Cognitive Distortions: errors in thinking or thinking traps we commonly fall for. Most high-performers are not pathological, but instead fall for them when upset or in high-stress situations. In this post, I| Leading Sapiens
How can you run more effective meetings? One way is to study folks who are masters at running effective meetings, and get paid for it — professional facilitators. Roger Schwarz is one of the world’s leading experts on facilitation. He has a set of what he calls ground rules for| Leading Sapiens
Just as the Toyota Production System revolutionized manufacturing, Amazon revolutionized the world of e-commerce. But unlike Toyota's system, Amazon's system has not been as widely studied. However, there are plenty of clues that can be found between Bezos' shareholder letters, and their leadership principles. Ram Charan and Julia Yang's The| Leading Sapiens
Everyone recognizes the importance of creative breakthroughs, but it continues to be a misunderstood phenomenon. Our need for creativity and insight also means a profusion of perpetrators promising easy solutions, and plenty of misconceptions. How do we increase the likelihood of insights? What can we do, or stop doing, to| Leading Sapiens
Viktor Frankl, a concentration camp survivor and the founder of Logotherapy, is most known for his classic book Man’s Search for Meaning. The construct of meaning forms the core of his philosophy. He identified an important framework that’s not as widely known — his laws of dimensional ontology. Although| Leading Sapiens