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BLG Leadership Insights

The Agenda Mover is Now Available For Pre-Order

Bacharach Agenda cover final Web

The first title in BLG’s Pragmatic Leadership Series is now available on Amazon.com. Published by Cornell University Press, The Agenda Mover outlines how leaders can move complex ideas through complex organizations.

Everyone is capable of coming up with a good idea, but a good idea without execution is hallucination. Leaders, including politicians and corporate officers, are those who have mastered the pragmatic skills that turn creative, innovative ideas into concrete realities. They are able to transform promises into results. The Agenda Mover leads you on the journey from having a good idea to bringing it to fruition. You will master the political competence to assure that your ideas gain momentum and achieve true traction. You will learn what it takes to go the distance to sustain your campaign and achieve your goals. Rather than dreaming about what could happen, you will become an agenda mover who gets things done and makes things happen.

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BLG Leadership Insights

Leading in Tech: How to Foster Innovation AND Drive Execution

Leading in Tech

Professor Samuel Bacharach will take part in a Q&A session on Leading in Tech at the NY Code and Design Academy. Professor Bacharach is a sought after coach, consultant, Inc. columnist and author well-known for his work with companies like Cisco, SunGard, Mindtree along with many of the Fortune 500, Inc. 5000 and Non-Profits/NGOs. Whether you’re building your company from the ground up, or seeking insight on how to bring innovation to your organization, you’ll want to hear this talk.

RSVP here.

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BLG Leadership Insights

Louisiana Women Leaders Business Conference

Louisiana Center for women in goverment bacharach

Professor Samuel Bacharach will be speaking at The Louisiana Women Leaders Business Conference this week. Go here for registration details.

The Louisiana Women Leaders Business Conference provides women with valuable information pertaining to issues affecting their economic well-being. This year our conference will be in conjunction with our Hall of Fame and will be a morning session with the well known Cornell University professor and author, Samuel Bacharach, empowering women with insight into organizational political competence.

 

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BLG Leadership Insights

Amazon’s Culture Problem

amazon's culture problem

One of Amazon’s 14 principles of leadership is entitled, “Have backbone; disagree and commit.” It suggests employees “challenge decisions when they disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting.”

We’ve all seen how that policy has propelled Amazon’s success—but we rarely get a glimpse of how it affects the overall culture of the organization until now.

In a groundbreaking New York Time’s article Jodi Kantor and David Streitfeld talked with over 100 former and current Amazon employees and learned how Amazon’s culture drives success, but fuels internal problems.

The article profiles current and ex employees who show an unnerving underbelly in Amazon’s culture: “Every person I worked with, I saw cry at their desk” and “If you’re a good Amazonian, you become an Amabot” [read: robot.] and, “You drown someone in the deep end of the pool” in order to poach their talent.

Clearly, the culture is competitive and as their leadership principles dictate, people are encouraged to “tear apart one another’s ideas in meetings.”

While Jeff Bezos has made a fortune from this completive culture, some think it will end up having long-term drawbacks. Talent is leaving and prospective employees are reluctant to join Amazon especially when employees feel like “the CEO of the company [is] in bed with you at 3 a.m. breathing down your neck.”

Of course those at Amazon “shoot for the moon” and want to think big and invent. They don’t mind toughing it out to be at the cutting edge. But can they continually push the envelope in such a culture?

Through our work at BLG we have found that organizations, both large and small, work better and produce more divergent ideas when their teams operate in an environment of safety.

Amazon’s competitive atmosphere requires bright talent to bring their best ideas to the table and have them withstand a gauntlet of criticisms and questions. Yet innovation research and BLG practice has found this practice doesn’t open the door to truly divergent, blue-ocean thinking.

To innovate ideas must be shared, but they must also be protected and added on to. Knocking an idea down will only stop the next idea from being aired.

Leaders must foster an environment where people can challenge, but aren’t pushing. They need to evaluate without judging and give feedback apart from political mechanisms.

And this is something Bezos can do. He himself said, “Part of company culture is path-dependent—it’s the lessons you learn along the way,” and, more recently, “My main job today: I work hard at helping to maintain the culture.”

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LG Leadership Insights offers advice to leaders, entrepreneurs, and students  

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BLG Leadership Insights

Why Leaders Need a Shakeup: Google Becomes Alphabet

 

google shakeup

On Monday Google formed a new company called Alphabet. Google Inc. will become part of Alphabet Inc.. This arrangement will allow Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin to continue to work on different projects (like extending human life) without distracting from Google’s search and video goals. Sundar Pichai, Page’s lieutenant, will become the new CEO of Google.

Larry Page defends the shakeup in his blog:

“We’ve long believed that over time companies tend to get comfortable doing the same thing, just making incremental changes. But in the technology industry, where revolutionary ideas drive the next big growth areas, you need to be a bit uncomfortable to stay relevant.”

The sudden shift gives both Google cofounders the space and the tools to work on new, innovative projects without upsetting investors. They hope that the shift will bring about the following:

“We are excited about…

  • Getting more ambitious things done.
  • Taking the long-term view.
  • Empowering great entrepreneurs and companies to flourish.
  • Investing at the scale of the opportunities and resources we see.
  • Improving the transparency and oversight of what we’re doing.
  • Making Google even better through greater focus.
  • And hopefully…as a result of all this, improving the lives of as many people as we can.”

Sometimes it is important for leaders to turn their business or their routines upside down in order to pursue new goals and innovation. Now Google cofounders can shoot for the moon and engage in Blue Ocean thinking without worrying about derailing their search business.

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BLG Leadership Insights offers advice to leaders, entrepreneurs, and students