Archive | communication

How Much of Leadership Is About Theater?

For reasons not worth getting into, this past week I was reminded of a decade-old HBS discussion entitled “How Much of Leadership Is About Control, Delegation, or Theater?” The original discussion was prompted by a claim from Stanford Professor Jeffrey Pfeffer that leaders only explain 10% of a company’s performance. Instead, a company’s current performance…

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Discover Your Inner Economist

I’ve been meaning to read Tyler Cowen’s Discover Your Inner Economist since it came out a decade ago. Cowen is an economics professor at George Mason University who describes himself as a “curious intellectual nerd polymath.” He also runs marginalrevolution.com, arguably one of the best economics blogs. While I was intrigued by the subtitle “Use Incentives…

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Lily Pads and Exponential Thinking

Longtime readers of my personal blog will know I believe storytelling is a fantastic way to introduce new ideas, make announcements more memorable, or to ensure you can break through the noise of traditional communication. As I wrote several years ago, We want consumers to view themselves as protagonists in a story with the brand…

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