Leadership

Is 47 Percent Good Enough?

It is no surprise that Republican Presidential candidate Mitt Romney once again has found himself in hot water over comments he made at a fundraiser. As discussed in previous articles (http://leadershipconnection.net/blog/romneys-inauthenticity-doom-defeat-november/) Romney’s propensity to “misstate” his positions comes less from jumbled words and more from a value system that isn’t always in sync with theRead… Read more »

Be an Office Nomad, It Pays Dividends

I had something else planned for today but I scrapped it in favour of simply sharing the following quotation from a Forbes article I read, its probably the most important thing I’ve read in a couple of weeks: On the people front, the behavior of leaders matters—big time. In our initial study on disruptive innovatorsRead… Read more »

The Goverment Man Talks About the GSA Scandal (Again) and the Inspector General – Some Fun Stuff

My last few blogs departed from the fun stuff from Confessions and shifted to some caustic commentary about the GSA scandal with just a few barbs pointed at the Office of the Inspector General. My You Tube videos did the same. Given the recent well-publicized and hard to justify midnight raid on someone’s hotel room,Read… Read more »

Online Training: 5 Takeaways from a Social Learning Experiment

This summer, GovLoop hosted its first ever multi-week social online training, called “Your Path to Leadership: Mastering Core Competencies to Get Ahead in Government.” The course examined 10 traits of a great leader, each of which corresponded to one of the Executive Core Qualifications (ECQs) of the Senior Executive Service (SES). The course consisted ofRead… Read more »

We Need Publicly Financed Elections

The fact that Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown has $1 million dollars in his campaign war chest is good news for the mayor but bad news for the citizens of Buffalo. It means there will not be a real election for mayor of Buffalo next year. No challenger will be able to compete in a significantRead… Read more »

The Balanced Scorecard

The Balanced Scorecard Institute is a well-respected organization that has a popular method for measuring organizational effectiveness. I’m going to work on building its lessons into my office. The basic idea behind the Balanced Scorecard comes from its creators, Drs. Robert Kaplan and David Norton: “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” AccordingRead… Read more »

The Factory Model

Craig Thomler’s post about redesigning government got me thinking about the other ways that legacies from the Industrial Revolution are no longer serving us well. The language could use some updating. So could the ways we think about how best to structure work. One of my recent favorite non-fiction books is “Shop Class as SoulRead… Read more »