Role models are people that others, rightly or wrongly, look up to and strive to emulate. They come in many shades and range from the truly great to the unspeakably bad. You can’t always pick your leaders, but you can choose your role models.
I had an interesting experience a few days ago. I had just responded to somebody’s online comment regarding one of my articles right here on LinkedIn when I received the following message
Some fifteen years ago, two Harvard academics, David B. Yoffie and Mary Kwak, published a business book titled Judo Strategy: Turning Your Competitors’ Strengths to Your Advantage, which became a best-seller and has since then been translated into ten languages.
A few days ago, my son graduated from high school, just a few days shy of Canada’s 150th birthday. The school that he, like his two sisters before him, graduated from is a public, co-ed, French-language high school in a predominantly English-speaking city.
There are entire sections in libraries devoted to leadership and many great leaders and thinkers have spent their lives trying to define and describe leadership. And there are innumerable courses and programs designed to help people become good leaders by focusing on one aspect or another of what makes a great leader.
I’m naturally optimistic but there are, I think, objective reasons for us to be concerned. I fear that we may be witnessing a fundamental shift in our socio-economic environment, one that could completely upend the kind of life that many of us, in developed countries, expect and take for granted.
Academic research has shown that happiness makes employees more productive while conversely, lower happiness is systematically associated with lower productivity. Similarly, a growing body of research supports the connection between diversity in the workplace and higher profitability
I’ve been suffering from migraines for over 30 years. I’m much better now but at one point in my life, in my mid-thirties, I reached a peak of 19 days per month.
As I press “enter” to publish this article, I’m a few hours away from addressing an audience of leaders on the topic of courage in the workplace.
I was having lunch recently with a colleague from another organization. We have similar jobs, are about the same age, have been married to our respective spouses for a long time and have children in either high school or university.
Most people know that judo, like many corporations, has a well-defined system of ranks. While companies use titles like “Associate”, “Director” or “Vice-President”, judo uses a system of belts: White to brown for the Mudansha and black for the Yudansha.
If you took a look at my LinkedIn profile, you would notice, in 2009, a 7-month gap in my employment history. That’s because on this very week exactly 8 years ago, I lost my job as an executive of a major financial institution, a job I had been extremely proud of and that in many ways, defined how I thought of myself.
