I was in Washington DC the last 6 days teaching on the Entrepreneurs’ Organisation Leadership Academy 2016. We had 28 leaders from all around the world – China, Nepal, Mexico, India, Pakistan, Canada, Germany, Australia, USA, UK. The White House was being prepared for the inauguration of the next US President. Christophe Magnussen is an … Read more
The mission of the IESE Business School, where I teach about 1,000 EMBA, MBA and Senior Management participants each year, is to “develop leaders who aspire to have a deep, lasting and positive impact on people, firms and society” and I have spent a lot of the last 13 years attempting to find a way to … Read more
Creative Indifference A good gardener creates the conditions for growth of a garden, but cannot force the flowers to grow in an exact way. The good gardener creates the conditions and accepts what arises. The bad gardener fights what arises. The bad gardener hacks and chops and fights against the natural growth of nature. The … Read more
We collect habits, items, people that served us in a given moment, but are not serving us now. Human beings come pretty well designed for Systematic Accumulation, adding more and more plans, projects, dreams to my bucket list. As we move through life we accumulate dreams, fantasies, projects, stuff. I often think about what else I would … Read more
The equation for human performance is the following: Performance = Potential – Self-Sabotage That is it. You achieve not what your boss lets you, not what the others let you… you achieve what you don’t screw up for yourself. In the years since I first wrote this equation up in a class and people said … Read more
In the spirit of changing myself for the better (and becoming a better father to my daughter), I wrote a short manifesto. http://cono.rs/idontknow In the next 10 years through to 2024, 1 Billion jobs will be taken over by machines. Google cars will replace taxis. IBM’s Watson will replace customer service staff. We cannot out-reason the machines. We must … Read more
You can’t begin to improve at something until you are “knowingly bad”. If you are not aware of the lack of something, you haven’t got “taste” yet. If you think you are the best blogger in the world, two things could be true: You really are the best blogger in the world You are blind … Read more
Leadership: You Have to Go First. I love this little Dilbert storyline from Scott Adams: Employee: “I find it rather demotivating that you never praise me for a job well done.” Boss: “You’ve never done a job well.” Employee: “That’s because I’m demotivated.” Boss: “You have to go first.” Employee: “Wouldn’t that make me the … Read more
In the last issue of IESE Insight magazine, Carlos Ghosn offered three key lessons he has learned during his career. First, he said, “Every problem has a solution,” but business leaders have to be prepared to pay the personal or collective price that will come with a given solution. Second, things have to get worse … Read more
This post is a follow up to the TED-Education post yesterday: What Aristotle and Joshua Bell teach us about Persuasion. If you haven’t already watched the lesson, you’ll need to as background to the material in this post. You can watch it here on TED Education. What could Joshua Bell do to get his music heard … Read more