Business Leadership: The Vision Thing

Just about every book or website about leadership will stress the importance of having a vision for the business. A vision is supposed to provide focus for the management, inspiration for the employees and reinvigoration for all stakeholders. Is this really true?

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Business Leadership at a Time of Economic Crisis

At times of good economic conditions, many businesses can chug along more or less successfully because customers have confidence and people are generally not too demanding. However, when times get difficult, the whole environment changes and, all of a sudden it seems, customers are short-tempered, demanding and flighty. At the same time, suppliers start to chase payment, credit dries up and employees spend their time making contingency plans in case the whole enterprise goes belly up.

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Business Leadership: Change Management

It is often argued that for meaningful change to take place in an organization, then it must have the open support of top management. This seems to be intuitively true (although empirical evidence is, as so often in the case of management issues, somewhat nebulous) since it is clear that most people dislike change for one reason or another.

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Business Leadership: Setting Objectives

In most organizations, people are so concerned with day-to-day activities that they rarely have the opportunity to look at the big picture – where is the organization going? Where will it be in ten or twenty years time?

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Business Leadership: The Learning Organization

A learning organization is one which in a systematic and progressive way seeks to learn from the activities that its members undertake, its interactions with the environment and changes in that environment. Being a learning organization is considered to be a vital or else critical competency for an organization that is seeking to be successful in markets which are particularly dynamic,

Read the full article here (or here, obviously: http://bizcovering.com/business/business-leadership-the-learning-organization/).

Business Leadership: Organizational Culture

All organizations have some kind of culture, although the quality and depth of that culture can vary enormously. Organizational or corporate culture is defined along lines of the values, norms and belief systems that are embedded in a particular organization. Like all forms of culture, organizational culture includes some people as part of a group and excludes everyone else.

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Business Leadership: Communication

When I was a young man, there were very few television channels or radio stations, certainly when compared to today. Now there are dozens freely available in most countries, not to mention those available for subscription, as well as the plethora of new media available through the ubiquitous internet. And all of those media producers are in constant need of new content.

Read the full article here.

Business Leadership: Secret Leaders

I once taught at an Islamic women’s university in the Middle East and the students were largely the daughters of granddaughters of wealthy oil families. The society was very conservative and the women were only allowed out of their houses or compounds under strict supervision and also had to face all kinds of gender-specific restrictions.

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Business Leadership: Archetypes

In the literature, if not always in real life, it is possible to identify several archetypes of business leader. These include the warrior, the magician, the priest and the scientist.

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Business Leadership: The Origin of the Tradition

Leadership is a much-discussed topic in business these days and there are many people who will argue that strong leadership is essential for any organization to be successful. When such people talk about leadership, they usually describe an individual who is personally charismatic, energetic and probably at the forefront of any activity.

Read the full article here.