Group items tagged

If you think that this violence has nothing to do with bro talk, you’re wrong. When we dehumanize people in conversation, we give permission for them to be degraded in other ways as well. And even if we don’t participate, our silence condones this language. I deeply regret remaining quiet while women were being disparaged during my eight years as a trader.

Rost found that writers on leadership had defined it in more than two hundred ways. Often, they glided between incompatible definitions within the same book: they argued that leaders should be simultaneously decisive and flexible, or visionary and open-minded. The closest they came to a consensus definition of leadership was the idea that it was “good management.” In practice, Rost wrote, “leadership is a word that has come to mean all things to all people.”

“The End of Leadership,” from 2012, Barbara Kellerman, a founding director of the Harvard Kennedy School’s Center for Public Leadership, wrote that “we don’t have much better an idea of how to grow good leaders, or of how to stop or at least slow bad leaders, than we did a hundred or even a thousand years ago.” She points out that, historically, the “trajectory” of leadership has been “about the devolution of power,” from the king to the voters, say, or the boss to the shareholders. In recent years, technological and economic changes like social media and globalization have made leaders less powerful.

Max Weber distinguished between the “charismatic” leadership of traditional societies and the “bureaucratic” leadership on offer in the industrialized world.

Khurana found that many companies passed over good internal candidates for C.E.O. in favor of “messiah” figures with exceptional charisma.

Charismatic C.E.O.s are often famous, and they make good copy;

y the mid-twentieth century

“process-based” approach. T

if you read a detailed, process-oriented account of Jobs’s career (“Becoming Steve Jobs,” by Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli, is particularly good), it’s clear that Jobs was a master of the leadership process. Time and time again, he gathered intelligence about the future of technology; surveyed the competition and refined his taste; set goals and assembled teams; tracked projects, intervening into even apparently trivial decisions; and followed through, considering the minute details of marketing and retail. Although Jobs had considerable charisma, his real edge was his thoughtful involvement in every step of an unusually expansive leadership process.

some organizations the candidate pool is heavily filtered: in the military, for example, everyone who aspires to command must jump through the same set of hoops. In Congress, though, you can vault in as a businessperson, or a veteran, or the scion of a political family.

whether times are bad enough to justify gambling on a dark-horse candidate.

Leadership BS

five virtues that are almost universally praised by popular leadership writers—modesty, authenticity, truthfulness, trustworthiness,

and selflessness—and argues that most real-world leaders ignore these virtues. (If anything, they tend to be narcissistic, back-stabbing, self-promoting shape-shifters.) To Pfeffer, the leadership industry is Orwellian.

Reading Samet’s anthology, one sees how starkly perspectival leadership is. From the inside, it often feels like a poorly improvised performance; leading is like starring in a lip-synched music video. The trick is to make it look convincing from the outside. And so the anthology takes pains to show how leaders react to the ambiguities of their roles. In one excerpt, from the memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, Samet finds him marching toward an enemy camp. Grant, a newly minted colonel who has never commanded in combat, is terrified: “My heart kept getting higher and higher, until it felt to me as though it was in my throat.” When the camp comes into view, however, it’s deserted—the other commander, Grant surmises, “had been as much afraid of me as I had been of him.” Leaders, he realizes, are imagined to be fearless but aren’t; ideally, one might hide one’s fear while finding in it clues about what the enemy will do.

“Just like we had with email, I think the whole population is going to have improved online engagement literacy,” Happe said during TheCR’s webinar, describing her five-year outlook. “I think we’re going to see an understanding that community management is a critical 21st-century skill, not just a role.”

But for a modern society, an even more pressing question is whether it wishes to accept everything that becomes possible in a data-driven economy. Do we want to live in a world in which algorithms predict how well a child will do in school, how suitable he or she is for a specific job -- or whether that person is at risk of becoming a criminal or developing cancer?

Users, of course, "voluntarily" relinquish their data step by step, just as we voluntarily and sometimes revealingly post private photos on Facebook or air our political views through Twitter. Everyone is ultimately a supplier of this large, new data resource, even in the analog world, where we use loyalty cards, earn miles and rent cars.

project-based unit on social-justice movements

Their goal: Produce independent research papers on topics of their choice, then collaboratively develop a multimedia presentation of their findings with classmates researching the same issue.

cloud-based tool called Google Slides

prepare written text (61 percent of respondents reported that their students did so "sometimes" or "often") conduct Internet research (66 percent), or learn/practice basic skills (69 percent).

Far more rare were teachers who reported that their students sometimes or often used technology to conduct experiments (25 percent), create art or music (25 percent), design and produce a product (13 percent), or contribute to a blog or wiki (9 percent.)

"most teachers [at the school] had adapted an innovation to fit their customary practices."

"second order" obstacles.

expanding teachers' knowledge of new instructional practices that will allow them to select and use the right technology, in the right way, with the right students, for the right purpose.

eachers and students in the small-scale study were found to be making extensive use of the online word-processing tool Google Docs. The application's power to support collaborative writing and in-depth feedback, however, was not being realized.

"We're telling teachers that the key thing that is important is that students in your classroom achieve, and we're defining achievement by how they do on [standardized] tests," she said. "That's not going to change behavior."

"job-embedded" professional development

"The smarter districts use those teachers to teach other teachers how to integrate tech into their lessons,"

Focus on innovation.

The organization disintegrates into a group of isolated camps, with little incentive to collaborate, share information, or team up to pursue critical outcomes. Various groups develop impervious boundaries, neutralizing the effectiveness of people who have to interact across them. Local leaders focus on serving their individual agendas - often at the expense of the goals of the rest of the organization. The resulting internal battles over authority, finances and resources destroy productivity, and jeopardize the achievement of corporate objectives. Talented (and frustrated) employees walk out the door - or worse yet, stay and simply stop caring.

Reward collaboration.

international conference calling platforms, like UberConference, teaming up with businesses like Slack and HipChat, encouraging the collaboration while in conference with company decision makers. This will keep people connected at the same time and allow multitasking to take place more effectively in one centralized location.

On the go, customers are looking for speed, reliability, and control.