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What skills do leaders need to succeed in the global economy? Harvard Business School professor Linda A. Hill and leadership coach and writer Kent Lineback share their point of view as part of our Next Gen Leaders Series.
As globally-integrated firms like IBM are discovering, the roles of formal authority and hierarchy are declining in the workplace. What remains, however, is the core purpose they served – the need to influence others, to make a difference in other people’s actions and the thoughts and feelings that drive those actions.
Thus, the key challenge for IBM and others is this: if authority and hierarchy are waning, what are now the primary tools of influence available to those responsible for the performance of others? How, for example, can IBM’s Global Enablement Teams of senior leaders from mature economies best influence and develop the skills of local managers in emerging economies?
In this new world, we believe there are three key tools of influence, which we call the three imperatives of leadership:
Manage Yourself: Your ability to influence others begins with you and who you are as a person, and the most important feature here is whether people trust you. Are they confident you will do the right thing? Effective leaders now build relationships based on trust, not authority or social ties like friendship. And they do that by earning people’s confidence in their competence and character, the key components of trust. People trust someone who knows what to do and how to do it (competence) and who intends to do the right thing (character). Trust is the foundation of all influence other than coercion.
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by Michael Useem, Professor of Management and Director of the Leadership Center, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania
A checklist is only as good as its underlying foundation, and the foundation is only as solid as the materials and engineering that go into it. That also applies to effective leadership, which I believe can be distilled into a set of core principles that help leaders navigate complex challenges around the world.
To build a Leader’s Checklist, I have tapped not only my own experience but also that of an array of investigators, researchers, thinkers, and managers. I have concluded that management experience points to a core of just 15 mission-critical leadership principles that vary surprisingly little among companies or countries: Continue Reading »
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Lia P Davis in
Kevin Nosbusch is an IBM senior technology consultant based in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In 1973 he played for the Fighting Irish during Notre Dame’s National Championship season, and went on to play for the San Diego Chargers.
When I played football at the University of Notre Dame and for the San Diego Chargers, broadcast television and radio were the primary ways fans enjoyed the game. There was no ESPN, no sports talk radio, the Internet was only known by DARPA scientists and social media didn’t exist.
Gosh, I sound pretty old. But in just 30 years the media and sports industries have been completely transformed by technology. Today, fans are not only Tweeting about their favorite players and teams, but just last week at the Pro Bowl athletes were participating in the virtual conversation on the field at Twitter stations.
This week, IBM and the University of Southern California Annenberg Innovation Lab (AIL) are conducting an analysis of social media trends related to Super Bowl Quarterbacks Tom Brady and Eli Manning. By analyzing hundreds of thousands of public tweets they’ll determine the fans’ sentimental favorite – the people’s champion if you will.
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As the systems that run the way we work and live become smarter, the way people connect and com
municate, find and share information, and perform everyday business tasks is changing in dramatic and dynamic ways.
Everywhere you look, new devices combined with social collaboration tools are transforming how work is done today — how information is shared, relationships are built, and decisions are made.
Thanks to clever social software tools that make collaboration happen easily and naturally, new delivery models such as cloud and mobile computing, and new ways of finding and sharing information, businesses are becoming social businesses — ones that are connected in a variety of ways, both inwardly and out.
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Chris Luongo in
As Connect 2012 participants meet this week to explore the transformative possibilities of a social business, social computing and collaboration are flowing like electricity among IBMers around the globe.
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The IBM Curiosity Shop on Flickr
The IBM Curiosity Shop on YouTube
By Alistair Rennie
GM, Collaboration Solutions
IBM Software Group
The iPad 2 and Kindle Fire will top many holiday wish lists this year. But not only can you play Angry Birds on these devices; tablets can be used at work, too.
Increasingly, employees are bringing in the technology they use at home and demanding the IT department accommodate them.
For years, companies have issued mobile devices to busy executives and sales representatives who depend on their company-issued devices to get the job done. However this thinking is antiquated. In today’s increasingly mobile culture, accessing critical business applications via mobile devices is a must-have for all employees.
In response, many organizations worldwide are adopting a BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) approach. Approximately 72 percent of firms surveyed by Aberdeen Group say they allow employees to use their own smartphones or tablets for work. And a recent IDC survey said that 95 percent of workers have used technology they purchased for themselves for work. I recently met with a CEO of large and fairly conservative company in Germany who purchased 1,000 iPad devices for their employees.
When IBM began planning its centennial celebration more than two years ago, publishing a book was high on the corporate to-do list. But, rather than producing a traditional centennial book (a glossy coffee table volume full of self praise), the company decided to do something quite different. The goal was to tell the story of the evolution of progress over the past 100 years, drawing lessons from IBM’s history and times that would be useful not just to IBMers but to others in business, government and academia. Also, since many people still think of IBM as a computer hardware company, the book would reintroduce the company to the world. It’s now, essentially, a solver of complex problems.
The book, published in June in the United States and more recently in seven other languages, is Making the World Work Better: The Ideas that Shaped a Century and a Company.
To do the research and writing, IBM commissioned three journalists, Kevin Maney, Jeffrey O’Brien and myself. Mike Wing, IBM’s speech writer extraordinaire, was the editor. I believe that all four of us would tell you that making this book was one of the more interesting and intellectually challenging experiences in our careers.
Now we’d like to share the experience with you via the Making the World Work Better book club on Goodreads. From Nov. 28 to Dec. 9, we’ll be responding to questions from readers. The club is open to all IBMers, alumni and the general public. So please join us–and don’t worry if you haven’t finished the book yet.
How to join the club:
- Register for a free account on Goodreads.com or log in using your Facebook, Twitter or Google account information.
- On Goodreads.com, join the Making the World Work Better author Q&A group.
(note: if you are not logged in you may see the message “membership is restricted”)
Once you’ve joined, make the most of your experience:
- Discuss the book with other readers or add new questions for the authors.
- Invite others to join the group.
- Use the hashtag #IBM100book when you tweet about the book.
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Steve Hamm in
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- Smarter Buildings
- Smarter Cities
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- Smarter Planet
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- Smarter Systems
- Smarter Traffic
- Smarter Transportation
- Smarter Utilities
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Rio De Janeiro is a bustling metropolis in a booming country–and, increasingly, an example of how government and business leaders can cooperate to make cities work better. Join the live blog today and tomorrow for coverage of speeches, panels and hallway discussions.
Here’s Sam Palmisano’s speech:
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Steve Hamm in
IBM, MIT Sloan School of Management and Harvard Business School today are sponsoring a symposium at the the two universities. The morning topic: How advances in information technology can help improve productivity, and improve incomes and create jobs for the 99%. It’s being followed this afternoon by a mock Jeopardy! match between Watson, IBM’s very smart computer, and teams from MIT and HBS.
Update:
Teams of three students from MIT/Sloan and HBS take on IBM’s Watson. (This is only the second contest matching Watson against collegians. In the previous contest, Watson beat teams from Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh. Pitt came in second, much to the chagrin of rival CMU!)
Harvard wins the first question, with “What is Belize?” Answering: countries in central America, ending with “e”
But then Watson takes over, running the category.
The machine picks “Who’s Your Daddy Company?” as the next category, eliciting a huge hook of laughter from the audience.
They finished the Jeopardy! round, with Watson, $8600; Harvard, $5200 ; and MIT, $-200 .
(I got disconnected from HBS’s Wi-Fi at a crucial moment, destroying the coverage of the second round. Grrrrr)
Final Jeopardy!
Clue: Finding the spot for this memorial caused its creator to say “Americans will march across that skyline.”
The question: Mt. Rushmore.
Harvard and Watson answer correctly. MIT does not.
Final score: Watson, $53,601; Harvard, $42,399; MIT, $100.
!!!!! Continue Reading »
