There are lots of blogs, facebook pages, twitter posts, and libraries on Leadership.
This is one of the consistently better ones, with often useful thoughts and links. http://leadershipfreak.wordpress.com/2011/02/28/how-to-extend-your-influence/
Organisations of all types and sizes are grappling with the impact of social media. It is simply a fact of life now that many if not most customers, employees, and value chain partners use it, the potential as a marketing and communication tool is only just starting to be leveraged, and the clash with the cultural norms of the 20th century organisation are profound.
The social media egg will not be unscrambled, and setting out to manage its implications on all the relationships that exist to make an organisation work by command and control mechanisms simply will not work. A new set of rules needs to apply, and we need to think differently about governance practices we employ, and look to what works elsewhere.
In addition to the governance issues, being effective in a hugely cluttered environment with no barriers to entry is remarkably difficult, so some simple marketing guidelines may be useful, irrespective of the delivery mechanism:
There is a big difference between these two states, and they can have a powerful impact on the way organisations react to the decision maker.
Someone who is seen as decisive, but as yet undecided will be have the respect of others, who will usually assist in the process of coming to a decision in a positive manner.
By contrast, someone who is seen as indecisive, will be ignored, and work-arounds will be used to get things done, and at some time, if it is a personal trait, it needs to be removed from behavior patterns, or the individual will be removed.
If Australia’s management has been slow to pick up on the need for intensive and innovative energy management programs, is it little wonder, with the litany of indecision, populism, back-stabbing, and just plain lies eminating from Canberra.
The Howard government announced an ETS in 2008, then lost the election, putting the Rudd government in power, espousing a view about the “greatest moral challenge of our time” and delivering a white paper that outlined their CPRS to be implemented in 2010.
Then we had the spectacle of a legislative program being pushed prior to any chance of certainty that may have come out of the Copenhagen group hug, which then failed to deliver on expectations.
Meanwhile, the Liberals had rolled Malcolm Turnbull, a climate change believer who had negotiated a bi-partisan approach to carbon pollution reduction, (illogically to be implemented before Copenhagen)by one vote and taken its bat and ball back to the corner labeled “skeptics”. A bit later, Rudd as PM was convinced by a cabal including his deputy to backpedal on their carbon scheme, and was subsequently rolled.
Now we have a renewal of the Labor Party “determination” to bring in a scheme being championed by said deputy as PM after an unequivacal promise prior to the last election that it would not happen.
Monty Python would shake its head at this lot, which is just what business leaders have done. In the face of the total shambles and indecision, they have moved very cautiously, as outlined in this Business Spectator/Accenture CEO Pulse survey, but nowhere near fast enough to come anywhere near being able to deliver the bi-partisan commitment to a 5% reduction on 2000 emissions by 2020.
From whichever political and climate change perspective you view this debacle of the last 14 years since the Kyoto protocol adopted by the UN in December 1997 it cannot engender any confidence that our “leaders” will actually provide the one thing that business really needs, certainty of the regulatory framework within which they must work and invest for the future.
Throughout my experience one factor continues to be a foundation for success in pretty much everything I see. Keeping “it” simple, or “KISS” reduces complication and the potential for misunderstanding, turf protection, and unintended consequences, and is far better than mastering the detail. Avoid the detail in the first place, recognising the truth in Einsteins quip that “not all that can be counted, counts”.
IBM appears to be celebrating achieving a mastery of the detail, and I suspect geeks are seriously excited, but any encouragement to foster an environment that complicates, simply because we can, appears pretty dumb to me, as articulating detail is way different to understanding the drivers of the detail, and the shadowy links visible only human imagination can uncover.