Tag: leadership

Before he was the managing director of executive mentoring firm Merryck & Co., Adam Bryant interviewed CEOs for his landmark New York Times column The Corner Office—over 600 of them, in fact. He shares his abundance of knowledge on leadership in his new book The CEO Test: How to Master the Challenges That Make or Break All Leaders, co-written with Amgen CEO Kevin Sharer.

Engaging, well-written, and jam-packed with insight, this guidebook covers the essential challenges of leadership, whether it’s setting a strategy, shaping a culture, or handling a crisis (a challenge that we all felt in the aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic). The CEO Test was selected as one of the Financial Times books to read for March. They write, “The authors practise what they preach, simplifying complexity (a leadership “superpower”), steering clear of cookie-cutter truisms, and preferring readable common sense to ideological waffle or textbook dryness.”

The CEO Test is available everywhere you buy books, and Bryant will join The Lavin Agency for a live Q&A on March 24th, answering some of your most critical leadership questions. Register for FREE today!

“A simplification month is a smart approach to focus everyone’s attention on one of the greatest challenges for companies of any size: complexity,” writes Adam Bryant. “In business, as in nature, complexity inevitably creeps into any ecosystem.” Initiatives that are introduced and quickly forgotten; departments—hungry for growth—lobbying for more resources; and strategy decks that “grow longer and busier, adding bullet points, tiered pyramids, and corkscrew arrows to describe where the company is going.” Complexity is not hard to accrue, and in fact, it has become the default.

But complexity will undoubtedly lead to entropy if left unchecked. To simplify your organization, Bryant proposes taking stock of everything you’re currently doing and culling whatever is unnecessary: “be ruthless,” he advises. In addition, Bryant suggests shifting your focus from priorities to outcomes by asking yourself what you really want to achieve over the next 12 months.

Read the full article here.

To book speaker Adam Bryant for your next event, contact The Lavin Agency and speak with a knowledgeable member of our sales team.

The most important characteristic of a leader, beyond high IQ or confidence, is a quality called “applied curiosity.” Different from our natural, hard-wired curiosity as human beings, applied curiosity is a more specific variety. “People who have it engage in relentless questioning to understand how things work. And then they start wondering how those things could be made to work better,” explains Adam Bryant. “They approach everything with an inquiring mind-set—whether it’s making sense of shifting consumer habits or the global macroeconomic trends that are shaping their industry.”

What separates the best of the best is how much they question, probe, and process everything they’re experiencing—and then look for insights and patterns. Such a questioning mindset has to be able to look forward just as much as it looks backwards. Bryant writes, “If one old definition of wisdom is that it’s a sense that ‘I’ve seen this movie before and I know how it plays out,’ then wisdom for leaders today increasingly means unlearning what they already know in order to explore what-if scenarios for an uncertain future.”

Read the full article here.

To book Adam Bryant for your next speaking engagement, contact a representative from The Lavin Agency today.

Lauren Eskreis- Winkler and her team at the University of Chicago designed an experiment to test whether a positive or negative management style would produce better outcomes. The research—forthcoming in the journal of Psychological Science and profiled by Forbes—overwhelmingly points to positive reinforcement as the superior strategy. “Our society celebrates failure as a teachable moment,” state Eskreis-Winkler and her team. “Yet we find that failure does the opposite: it undermines learning. Failure feedback undermines learning motivation because it is ego-threatening. It causes participants to tune out and stop processing information.”

To arrive at this conclusion Eskreis-Winkler and her team provided success-oriented feedback to one set of participants, and failure-oriented feedback to another. They found that those in the former category were able to recall information and perform the activity with better accuracy. “Our key result is that people find failure feedback ego-threatening, which leads them to tune out, and miss the information it offers. Tuning out from a pursuit in the moment of failure could be the first step in a chain reaction that distances and discourages people from the goal they are pursuing.”

Read the full article here.

To book speaker Lauren Eskreis-Winkler for your next speaking event, contact The Lavin Agency and speak to a knowledgeable representative.

The induction ceremony takes place in Toronto today, and Horn-Miller is one of only eight athletes in the class of 2019. Her incredible journey to both activism and athleticism began at a young age when, at 14, she protested during the Oka Crisis and, after nearly 80 days of stand-off with the RCMP and armed forces, she was stabbed in the chest by a Canadian soldier with a bayonet. The image of her wounded, holding her young sister, was shared across national media—and impacted Canadians to better understand, and care about Indigenous issues. 

After that traumatic event, Horn-Miller had to make a choice; succumb to the PTSD and pain, or push through it all to pursue incredible new goals—goals that would eventually lead her to the Hall of Fame.

After winning gold with her water polo team at the Pan Am Games, she became the first Mohawk woman from Canada to ever compete in the Olympic games, co-captaining Team Canada in Sydney 2000. That same year, she appeared on the cover of TIME magazine, striking an iconic image of strength, power and perseverance.

A long-time advocate for the health of Indigenous communities, Horn-Miller was the host of Working It Out Together—a 13-part documentary and healthy-eating initiative with the Aboriginal Peoples’ Television Network. “Sport in the Native world is more than just something to be physically active,” she said. “It’s a suicide preventer. It’s a self-esteem creator. It’s a leadership developer.”

Horn-Miller is also formerly the Director of Community Engagement for the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls, an incredibly important initiative: one that seeks justice, raises awareness of violence against Indigenous women, and furthers the dual tasks of healing and reconciliation.

Different stakeholders want different things. Millennials want to work for companies that share their social values. Investors want to support environmentally conscious companies. And consumers want products that are both ethically made and inexpensive. So how do organizations deal with these pressures—especially when they conflict with financial performance?

“Addressing these paradoxes is at the heart of [Sarah] Kaplan’s book, a guide that aims to topple economist Milton Friedman’s dictum that ‘the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits,’” writes The Financial Times. “Instead, Kaplan urges us ‘to look at the stakeholders that surround companies from all directions, all 360 degrees,’ from the workers in a clothes factory to the community exposed to its waste products. Only then, Kaplan argues, will companies be able to consider innovative ways to respond to these seemingly intractable trade-offs.”

With a solid structure, thorough research, and rich case studies, Kaplan’s book is “full of nuggets that will fascinate leaders, both established and inspiring.”

Read the full review, here.

To book speaker Sarah Kaplan for your next speaking event, contact The Lavin Agency today.

“Today, increasingly, corporations are being asked, pressured, forced, encouraged, regulated, and coaxed to consider a broader set of stakeholders in their calculations,” writes Sarah Kaplan in her book The 360° Corporation. “There are many reasons for this. The 2008 financial crisis forced attention on how corporations can have broad-ranging effects on society. Climate change has attuned people to the potentially toxic effects of corporate policies. The global supply chain is more visible than ever before, and many consumers are conscientious of their buying habits than they were in the past.”

Whatever the case may be, it’s clear that stakeholder demands can no longer be ignored—even when they conflict with the bottom line. What can today’s businesses do to navigate these challenges? How can business leaders make the necessary trade-offs and feel confident in their decisions? Kaplan has spent nearly a decade thinking critically about the role of corporations in society, and how they can address these new stakeholder demands. In her talks, she shows us how to turn the conflict into a channel for innovation—and transformation.

“Tom sent me the proposal, and it’s actually pretty good.”

“Yeah, that suggestion actually came from Jane.”

“I actually like that idea.”

These three examples may sound benign at first, but, Adam Bryant explains that using the word “actually” to talk about our colleagues has a strong detrimental effect. “The obvious problem is the subtext,” Bryant says. “It signals that the person speaking was expecting less from the colleague, who somehow exceeded those low expectations by actually doing good work.”

In order to remedy these unintended, insidious effects of language, leaders must embody the change they’d like to see.  “If leaders consistently undermine their people, they will also undermine the expectation that their people will do the right thing, whatever the context. If that expectation goes away, so, too, does motivation.”

Read the full article here.

Interested in booking a leadership speaker like Adam Bryant for your next speaking event? Contact The Lavin Agency today.

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 role permanently.

Ajay Agrawal—Digital Thinking Award
In their book Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence, Ajay Agrawal and his colleagues Avi Goldfarb and Joshua Gans, consider AI as a basic commodity. With clarity and insight, they reveal a simple economic framework for understanding the artificial intelligence revolution.

Safi Bahcall—Innovation Award
Former biotech entrepreneur Safi Bahcall applies his physics training to the study of innovation, offering a new and unique take on the subject. His book, Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries, draws on the science of phase transitions to explain the behavior of companies—and reveals how a change in structure can help nurture the radical break-throughs that change the world.  

Francesca Gino—Talent Award
Rebels have a bad reputation, according to Harvard Business School professor Francesca Gino. The behavioral scientist has spent more than a decade studying “rebel talent” in organizations, and what we can learn from them. Her book, Rebel Talent, offers a practical, science-backed guide for when and how to break the rules—bringing joy, meaning, and fulfillment in our lives.

Chris Clearfield & András Tilscik—Strategy Award
In their award-winning book  Meltdown: Why Our Systems Fail and What We Can Do About It, Chris Clearfield and Andras Tilscik explain how the increasing complexity of our systems set us up for failure. By better understanding the conditions of these failures, Clearfield and Tilscik help us design better systems and prevent “meltdowns” in business and in life.

Shoshana Zuboff —Digital Thinking Award
Scholar Shoshana Zuboff explores the rise of digital technology as it relates to capitalism. In her landmark book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, Zuboff warns against the dangers of corporate powers that seek to control human behavior. The consequences—for individuals, society, even the foundations of our democracy—are far more sinister than they initially appear.