James Drogan

The title of this post is the title of a post from one of my favorite bloggers, Irving Wladawsky-Berger.  I draw attention to it, particularly the attention of my students who aspire to positions of leadership, for what it says are the characteristics of leaders.

Wladawsky-Berger speaks from wide experience in the hard, cold, global world of commerce.  There is no academic point of view here, of drawing conclusions from research, but rather of drawing conclusions from living and doing.

His three principal characteristics -- modesty and humility, an open mind, and a culture of collaboration -- are ones which agree with my some 44 years of experience in business and academia.

I'll end with a line from Wladawsky-Berger's post.

"The reason companies are often not able to turn themselves around and survive a serious crisis is not because they don't know what to do, but because the culture of the institution is not able to embrace the needed changes."

And therein is the rub.  My friend Dave calls it "organisclerosis."  It was recently suggested that I should take the lead in developing an online process to replace an existing manual process.  I turned this down because my assessment was that that portion of the organization that owned the process wasn't prepared to change.