For Executive Women Seeking C-Suite Success
What do these people have in common? Marissa Mayer – Yahoo Meg Whitman – Hewlett-Packard Patricia Woertz – Archer Daniels Midland Indra Nooyi – PepsiCo Pam Nicholson – Enterprise Holdings They’re all women, of course. And they’re also all CEOs. Beyond that they’re very different, except for one important thing: Once they were in a situation just like the one you’re in now. At some point in their career, each of those successful women had to decide if she wanted to commit herself to the time and effort to rise to the C-Suite. It’s a big...
Read MoreTime Management: It’s More Than Avoiding the Urgent
There are probably very good reasons why the time management system that contrasts the important/unimportant and urgent/not urgent is the most popular. For one thing, it can be simple and easily understood. Like so many management models, it can be explained in a simple two-by-two fashion. Another reason the model is popular is that managers have found that it helps them to establish their priorities and, as a result, to get more done. Even when things are ticking over as they should, there never seems to be enough time to do what’s important, never mind anything else. A third reason may...
Read MoreKeep Your Eye on the Ball
Over time, many companies lose their way. They reach a point where they no longer know who they are, where they are going, or why. They start out to do one thing, but then they gradually migrate into something else. And most of them do so for all the wrong the reasons. Some organizations do this by deliberately leaving behind their original products. Time’s online magazine has cited companies such as Xerox, Nokia, and Apple as examples. Other companies deliberately pursue a new path, but realizing their mistake, retreat back into familiar territory. Several years ago, The New...
Read MoreWhy are there so few women in top leadership roles?
Why are there so few women in top leadership roles? We’ve been working on this issue for a very long time and we’ve made some progress, but not at the top. Women college graduates outnumber men in the United States. About a third of fulltime MBA students are women. Women hold nearly 40 percent of managerial positions. But when we look at the C-Suite, the situation is very different. Women only hold about nine percent of top leadership positions. Only about four percent of Fortune 500 CEOs are women. People come at this issue in several different ways. You may think of it...
Read MoreOrganizational Resistance to Organizational Change
As a discipline, the management of organizational change has been in existence for more than 50 years; yet we are no closer now to making it effective than we were then. Nearly three-quarters of all such endeavors fail miserably. Not only do companies fall well short of their financial targets, but untold psychological damage is done, both to those who lose their jobs, and those who don’t. Traditionally, the blame for all this has been laid at the door of employees. The presumption has been that the leaders “did the right things,” but that try as they might, managers couldn’t get the...
Read MoreHow bureaucratic is your company?
Everybody loves to hate bureaucracy. We love the cartoons and jokes that make fun of people who follow the rules, even when the rules make no sense. We hate the clerk who shrugs and says that he or she can’t make an exception to company policy. People have probably hated bureaucracy for as long as it has been around and that’s a very long time. In the Ancient Middle East, scribes administered the rules laid down by kings and emperors and pharaohs. The basic definition of a “bureaucracy” is the same today as it would have in Imperial China or Ancient Sumer....
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