Vanguard Leadership (or The Importance of Being our own Best Friend)

Is there room in the world for a CEO who wears their heart on their sleeve? Absolutely, undoubtedly, unequivocally, yes!  Such a leader is a vanguard leader.  We were recently in conversation with a CEO who wondered aloud if there is a place for someone like him; someone who, in my estimation, expresses how he…

New Models of Leadership?

“Many people live in the hallucination that they can truly lead other people without being able to lead themselves and this is pure fantasy. It is much easier to try to change other people and not being willing to change ourselves. This exercise of authenticity is very much needed if we truly want to inspire,…

Values purpose and meaning

Bizarrely, if you went into most school classrooms in the industrialised world, you would still hear teachers say or imply, “Sit down, stop talking, do your own work.”  I say bizarrely, because this notion that we will excel in our lives only if we do what we’re told, mind our own business and draw solely…

Leaderless = Leaderfull

I’ve devoted a number of my posts to the topic of leader development.  In this post, I’d like to say more about what I mean by leader development because my thinking doesn’t come from a view that leaders are solely those at the top of organisations.  Furthermore, and perhaps more importantly, when I talk about…

Leadership and complexity

If you have ever been for an eye test, you will know that the optician will have you look through a contraption with lots of lenses, and then proceed to add and take away lenses until your vision can see the letters on the chart precisely.  They will spend time experimenting with the lenses and…

Transcendent leadership

Reading the London #riotcleanup Twitter stream last week was fascinating.  Taken in isolation and looked at one-dimensionally, one might consider a community that mobilises itself to clean up after riots to be a positive phenomenon.  The range of views on the Twitter feed does not bear this out however.   Some views extend to calling…