Great Leaders Grow

From the AMEX Open Forum:

“Ken Blanchard is one of the original business gurus, and the inventor of the modern business fable, so it’s my pleasure to review his recent offering. Ken rose to guru status with The One Minute Manager, which started out as a self-published book. Ken has just published a new fable, called Great Leaders GROW: Becoming a Leader for Life.

Great Leaders Grow continues the business saga of Debbie Brewster, a character the authors introduced in their previous book,.  The emphasis in Great Leaders Grow is showing leaders, and aspiring leaders, how to ensure that they’ll be able to effectively serve others throughout their careers.”

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News: Social Assistance Review Commission releases 2nd discussion paper

From the commissioners, Frances Lankin and Munir A. Sheikh:

“With the release of Discussion Paper 2: Approaches for Reform we are entering the second phase of our engagement process.

Our purpose with this paper is to seek your perspective on the different approaches to improving social assistance that we are considering based on what we heard and learned through our research. We hope you will take the time to send us your thoughts, which you can do through this website.

This paper advances the dialogue we began last June, when we asked for your ideas on how to solve the key issues facing the social assistance system. The response was tremendous, and we benefited greatly from the views of the more than 2000 individuals we heard from last summer during our community visits, as well as in the more than 700 submissions sent to us. We also benefited from our discussions with First Nations, learning that we need to think differently about social assistance in First Nations communities and always be mindful of their unique historical, legal and cultural context. We appreciate how many people took the time to share their views with us.

We have summarized the feedback we received in What We Heard: A Summary of Discussions on Social Assistance, also available on this site. We encourage you to read the summary as a companion to the second discussion paper.

It is clear to us that the system will require transformative change. Small fixes will not suffice, if we are to meet the goal of helping more people on a path to a better life.

We would like to receive your feedback on the approaches discussed in the paper by Friday, March 16. The input and advice we receive in response to Approaches for Reform will help frame our recommendations to the government in June.”

Click here to access all reports published by the commission so far.

Don’t Confuse Passion with Competence

From the HBR:

“The most successful innovators are consistently portrayed as possessing a passion that borders on dogmatism. They work tirelessly to bend reality to achieve their vision, with Steve Jobs and his “reality distortion field” serving as the prototypical example.

There’s no doubt that passion is a critical component of innovation. After all, innovation is awfully hard work, with plenty of false starts. Rosabeth Moss Kanter teaches that everything can look like a failure in the middle. Mike Tyson puts it another way: “Everybody has a plan, until they get punched in the face.” Passion is necessary to keep pushing when the punch inevitably lands.

And without passion it’s hard to do something that’s meaningfully different from what has been done before. It’s next to impossible to prove that a new idea will work. Passion and intuition are necessary ingredients for disruptive success.

But leaders overseeing innovation efforts inside their companies need to be careful of mistaking passion for competence. The philosopher George Santayana defined a fanatic as someone redoubles their effort when they have forgotten their aim. We’ve all encountered the innovator who keeps pounding the table, insisting that his vision is right despite mounting evidence (and bills) suggesting otherwise.”

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