(or on the folly of rewarding A while hoping for A)
“Do you guys have email addresses?” our waitress asked. It was Thursday, and my colleague and I were partaking in 60-cent Boneless Wings Day. After delivering a sarcastic “No” I inquired why she was asking so bluntly. She wanted us to enroll in the Buffalo [...]
Transformational leadership involves the ability to inspire and motivate followers to take action toward the desire goal or behavior. We all know that inspiration is a vital part of effective leadership, most of us just don’t know what it means to inspire someone. Instead, we sell them on the desired actions or levels of performance [...]
Often managers are called to be more than just managers; they’re called to be leaders. Recent literature continues to blur the line between management and leadership. However, one theory stands out because of its potential to make clear cut distinctions between leaders and managers: Transformational Leadership theory.
Transformational Leadership is a relatively new approach to leadership [...]
W Edwards Deming was an American statistician, considered the father of the modern quality movement. In 1982, Edwards Deming published “Out of the Crisis” identifying 14 points for management which if applied would enable Japanese manufacturing efficiencies to be realized.
Deming’s 14 Points:
Create constancy of purpose and continual improvement where long-term planning replaces short-term reaction.
Adopt this [...]
LeaderLab is a community of resources. We intentionally chose the term community not just to show that it is more than one blog or one journal, we also chose it because we’re trying to create a community of those how want to help leaders practice theory. In only six months of existence, we’ve found and [...]
Systems thinking is the understanding of how things influence one another within a whole. In nature, systems examples include ecosystems in which various elements and creatures work together to survive or perish. In organizations, systems consist of people, structures and processes that work together to make an organization healthy or unhealthy.
Systems thinking is one way [...]
I’ve just released a new article through LeaderLab Papers. It is a PDF summary of various leadership theories and a collection of posts from this blog.
01.02 The Portable Guide to Leadership
Airport bookstores are crowded with books on leadership and each one seems to promote a “leadership lack.” They’ll each begin with phrases like “The most [...]
Theory of Constraints (TOC) is an overall management philosophy introduced by Dr. Eliyahu M. Goldratt that is geared towarding help organizations continually achieve their goals. The theory contends that any manageable system is limited in achieving more of its goal by a very small number of constraints and that there is always at least one [...]
In the 1950s Kurt Lewin created a new discipline of management: change management. Managers and leaders had always been tasked with instigating and facilitating transitions, but Lewin’s work represented the first well-researched theoretical model describing the change process. Lewin believed organizational change happened in three stages: unfreezing, change and freezing.
The unfreezing stage involved overcoming inertia [...]
Volume 1, Issue 2 (Spring 2010)
[Download/Print Entire Issue]
Letter from the Editor
[Download/Print Article]
The Future of Doing Good Lakeisha McKnight
Competition has increased. The non-profit environment has changed, causing companies within the non-profit industry to think and plan strategically about how they will help their organizations thrive and succeed. This article provides non-profit organizations with five future trends [...]
About
David Burkus is the editor of LeaderLab, a community of resources dedicated to promoting the practice of leadership theory. He is an executive coach, a sought-after speaker and an adjunct professor of business at several universities.