Search Results for: leadership

The demands of the corner office are notoriously difficult: impossible decisions, sleepless nights, the expectation to perform consistently at a high-level. It’s no wonder that the average CEO today rarely lasts longer than five years. In his new book The CEO Test, leadership expert and New York Times bestselling author Adam Bryant covers the seven […]

“Actually.” It’s a word so neutral, it must be harmless. Right? Wrong. As a news editor and leadership consultant, Adam Bryant has sat in thousands upon thousands of meetings throughout his career. Drawing upon this experience, Bryant shares why “actually” may be hurting team performance.  “Tom sent me the proposal, and it’s actually pretty good.” […]

“A lot of what women have been presented as a model is about perfection,” says Maureen Chiquet in a recent New York Times profile. Now, the author of Beyond the Label and former CEO of  fashion atelier Chanel speaks about finding purpose rather than perfection. Shortly after leaving her position at Chanel, Maureen Chiquet packed her […]

As leadership speaker and retired Major General Lewis MacKenzie says, anyone can lead a team when times are easy. Unfortunately, as he tells the crowd at the Compliance Week 2013 annual conference, the business leaders of today are generally faced with extremely difficult situations every day. The only way for an organization to succeed in […]

“How do creative people lead? How is that possible?” leadership speaker John Maeda asked the audience in his keynote at the Design Indaba Conference 2013. While he says that creative people are sometimes seen as “flaky,” their agile and adaptable nature makes them an asset to any organization. In a post-speech interview, Maeda says that many […]

“People are a function of the environment where you teach them,” says leadership speaker Bill Strickland. In a new interview, the president and CEO of the Manchester Bidwell Corporation explains that it's easy for people to fall through the cracks if no one recognizes their potential. However, taking a chance on someone and providing them with […]

Leadership speaker Lewis MacKenzie, a retired General-Major and one of the world's most respected peacekeepers, believes that there are more effective measures that the country can take to ease the conflict in Mali than “boots on the ground” combat. As he writes in a piece in The Globe & Mail: “Significant additional logistic support to […]

As John Maeda argues in Forbes, business leaders can stand to learn a great deal from artists and designers. That explains why architect Zaha Hadid was recently given the Aenne Burda award for creative leadership. Maeda, a conference speaker at this week's Digital-Life-Design event, asked attendees whether they considered themselves to be creatives, leaders, or […]

In a new article in Forbes, John Maeda says that the future of innovation lies in the hands of the creatives—and that the most successful leaders will be those who embrace creative forms of team management. Business leaders can stand to learn a great deal from artists and designers, he explains, especially in terms of […]

As part of the GigaOM RoadMap: Design in the Age of Connectedness event, conference speaker John Maeda gave a keynote about the “important vectors of design, leadership and connected culture.” Maeda is the President of the Rhode Island School of Design and works to humanize technology. Currently, Maeda is focusing on the intersection of design and […]

One of the world’s most respected innovation educators, John Maeda has learned many valuable lessons on leadership from his first few eventful years as president of The Rhode Island School of Design, one of the country’s most prestigious colleges of art and design. Those lessons—part of his process of designing “how to talk about/with/for the […]

Few CEOs navigated the Great Recession as skillfully as David Cote. In a new interview with Fortune, the inspiring corporate leader offers guidance for businesses managing the coronavirus crisis today.  When David Cote inherited Honeywell in 2002, the company was teetering on the brink of failure thanks to a mishandled merger with GE. Yet Cote […]

New Year’s resolutions like changing your diet, fitness, and lifestyle can often be fleeting. So why not take a page from leadership expert Adam Bryant’s book and tackle something at work that’s well within your control? In his latest article for Strategy+Business, Bryant makes a compelling argument for turning January into a “Simplification Month.”  “A […]

Over the last decade, Adam Bryant has interviewed more than 500 CEOs for his landmark column in The New York Times. From brains to ambition to humility, Bryant discovered the list of qualities that make up a successful leader is long. But what is the elusive trait at the top? In a new article for […]

Having been an inspiring athlete and Indigenous activist for decades, Waneek Horn-Miller has been breaking barriers and records her entire life. Her latest achievement is being inducted into the elite Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame—making her the first water polo player to be honoured.  The induction ceremony takes place in Toronto today, and Horn-Miller is […]

As the former chairman and CEO of Honeywell, David Cote led one of the most historic turn-around’s the manufacturing industry had ever seen. In his upcoming book Winning Now, Winning Later, he distills those strategic leadership lessons for the next generation of business chieftains and managers.  Should an organization focus on its current numbers, or […]

As the first female President and CEO of the Hudson’s Bay Company, Bonnie Brooks restored the aging institution back to its former glory. More recently, she has been acting as interim CEO of Chico’s—the international women’s fashion retailer—following the abrupt departure of Shelley Broader. Today, the Financial Post announced that Brooks will take on the […]

The moon landing wouldn’t have happened without President John F. Kennedy, he who boldly promised the nation that we would reach the moon before the Soviets. But would we have gotten there by 1969—as promised—if he hadn’t been assassinated? In his latest article for Fast Company, Charles Fishman reveals surprising evidence that suggests JFK was […]

Thinkers50, the premier ranking of global business leaders, announced the nominees for their 2019 Distinguished Achievement Awards. Dubbed the “Oscars” of Management Thinking by the Financial Times, this year’s shortlist features no less than six Lavin Speakers, whose ideas are being recognized for their potential to change the world.   Ajay Agrawal—Digital Thinking Award In […]

Women don’t run the world (yet). But these women in leadership speakers—Maureen Chiquet, Jessica Jackley and Margot Lee Shetterly—are some of the strongest in their field, offering dynamic insights into how they’ve leaned in and leveraged their unique skillsets to make it in predominantly male worlds.   As Global CEO of Chanel and President of Banana […]

“It started with a simple idea: What if I sat down with chief executives, and never asked them about their companies?” From there, Adam Bryant distilled hundreds of interviews into six practical steps to leadership, which he shared in his landmark New York Times column, Corner Office. Now, a decade after creating it, Bryant is leaving the Corner […]

The VP of Engineering Practice at Autodesk—a world leader in software tech—is neither an engineer nor a man. She’s Minette Norman, a liberal arts major and new Lavin speaker whose unique perspectives on leadership initiated the company’s transformative culture change.   She achieved this by creating an environment of meaningful connection and radical empathy: where vulnerability, compassion and emotion are […]

Major news! Angelina Jolie is in talks to star in the upcoming film Shoot Like a Girl: the big-screen adaptation of Lavin speaker Maj. MJ Hegar’s memoir of the same name.   Entertainment Weekly reports:   “The actress and filmmaker is in talks to star in Shoot Like a Girl, an adaptation of Air Force […]

We are so thrilled to announce that Bonnie Brooks, Vice Chairman of Hudson's Bay Company, has joined Lavin as a new exclusive speaker! Bonnie Brooks has restored Canada’s great department store, Hudson's Bay Co., to its rightful place as a world-class retailer. As its first female CEO, Brooks led The Bay through sweeping, institutional changes—no […]

“Ultimately, good design will be born from consideration of multiple perspectives,” leadership speaker John Maeda writes in Wired. “It should be something we haven’t even dreamed of yet.” He adds: “What we need now is to move beyond the superficial conversation about styles and incremental adjustments to boldly invent the next frontier of interface design.” […]

While many people might not see the location surrounding the Manchester Bidwell Foundation as beautiful (it's located in a somewhat rough area in Pittsburgh), leadership speaker Bill Strickland says beauty was a core element in the center's design process. “The building is very hopeful and it's very bright—even on a gray day,” Strickland told NPR […]

“Environment drives behavior,” leadership speaker Bill Strickland told the audience at Chicago Ideas Week. “Beautiful environments create beautiful kids, prisons create prisoners.” That's why the MacArthur Genius designed his arts and training centers with aesthetics in mind, and argues that everyone deserves to live, work, and learn in beautiful surroundings. In the keynote, Strickland chronicled […]

As leadership speaker John Maeda tells the audience at the World Economic forum, taking a creative approach to leadership can prove to be highly effective. Or, more accurately, he showed them. In his talk, he illustrated—quite literally—his points using sketches and diagrams. His presentation was reviewed in a recent Scientifc American article, and they praised […]

“People matter,” says leadership speaker Bill Strickland in a recent keynote. “People are assets, not liabilities…[and] it is all in the way that you treat people that drives performance and drives behavior.” In the speech, Strickland explained that improving productivity begins with improving working environments. “Environment drives behavior,” he says, “beautiful environments create beautiful people, beautiful […]