Storytelling
Read moreLast week, I traveled to Ecuador to present the Leadership Workshop portion of the High Potentials Program of Harvard Business Review-Latin America. As such, I lectured on two days, first in Guayaquil and then in Quito. It was a quick and enlightening visit. In my discussions with the participants, I discovered much about this country and its people. And, the
The stories that keep us grounded
Read moreRecently, I read an interesting article by Bill George, former CEO of Medtronic and now a professor at Harvard Business School, entitled “Why leaders lose their way”. You can read the article here Professor George discusses the recent spate of revelations and resignations (among them Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Mark Hurd of H-P and several US public officials) where leaders at the
Life these days
Read moreSince I am in the mist of a busy week in the US, with little time to seat for a long and reflective blog, I thought I would dimply write about two of the project. I am working on here, is, tell my own story a bit. Most of my work time this week has gone to two interesting projects:
In organizations, leaders are less able to use storytelling to manipulate
Read moreIf any virtue taken to excess can become a vice, storytelling is no exception. As I have written here on several occasions, my years of coaching have taught me that storytelling is an underutilized form of communication that leaders can learn to exploit to their advantage. The more I work with businesses and the people who run them, the more
A response to negative views of storytelling
Read moreSince I began writing about storytelling, authenticity and manipulation on this blog March 31, I have written several posts advocating the use of authentic stories of identity in a leader’s discourse. Sometimes, though, when I speak in public venues of the benefits of story-based approaches in leadership communication, I am reminded that others may have a somewhat different view of
More on Howard Gardner, and Margaret Thatcher’s stories of identity:
Read moreLast time, I wrote that it was Howard Gardner’s Leading Minds that got me started thinking about leaders and how they use their stories of identity. For Gardner, “the artful creation and articulation of stories constitutes a fundamental part of the leader’s vocation”, and these well-crafted stories constitute “the single most powerful weapon in the leader’s literary arsenal.” Whether consciously