With graduation season upon us, it's important to remember that as a manager you must often be a teacher too. A major part of your role is instruction – which means that you need to pay attention to the massive disruption going on in higher education and what it means for company learning.

The most visible part of educational disruption is the proliferation of online learning through MOOCs, or massive, open, online courses. These programs, sponsored by elite universities such as Harvard, Stanford, Berkeley, and Wesleyan, have enrolled thousands of students around the world in high-level courses developed by top-notch ...

Have you noticed that general managers are scarce these days? These are the executives who run discrete businesses and control all of the resources associated with them. But in many large companies, the only true general manager is the CEO. Everyone else, whether in the C-suite or in the senior management ranks, runs a piece of a business or a support function.  As a result, a limited number of people have full, end-to-end accountability for business success – and there are few opportunities for managers to learn all aspects of a business. This may be one of the reasons why many ...

For most of us, starting at a new company brings up those same anxieties we felt when starting in a new school as a child. All of a sudden you don’t have any friends, you’re not sure what you’re supposed to do, and it’s hard to find the bathroom. Adding to the pressure is the unspoken fact that the clock is ticking: Your new colleagues may give you a grace period, but you know that they are making judgments about whether or not you’ll be a good fit, starting on day one. And of course ...

Although it doesn't show up explicitly in any personality test, some people seem to be more prone to creating complexity than others. Instead of cutting to the heart of an issue, they tangle it further; rather than narrowing down projects, they allow the scope to keep expanding; and instead of making decisions, they defer until there is more data and better analysis.

These behaviors are characteristics of people that I call "complexifiers." Like Pig-Pen, the Peanuts character who carries around his own cloud of dust, complexifiers seem to leave complexity in their wake, making it more difficult for subordinates ...

Launching a new enterprise – whether it's a tech start-up, a small business, or an initiative within a large corporation – has always been a hit-or-miss proposition. Over the past few years, a new methodology has emerged that can make the process much less risky: The "lean start-up".

Young ventures are testing hypotheses, gathering early and frequent customer feedback, and showing "minimum viable products" to prospects. This new process recognizes that searching for a business model is entirely different from executing against that model.

The cover article of the current issue of Harvard Business Review is "The Lean Start-Up Changes Everything ...

When my children were young and it was past their bedtimes, I used to give them a choice: Either walk to your room, or be carried. While this gave them control over how they would go to bed, it left them no choice about the end result. In other words while I wanted to give them options for some things, it was clear that others were non-negotiable.

Managers often have this same kind of parental dilemma. They need subordinates to achieve a certain result, but want them to have a choice about how to do it. This issue is particularly ...

Americans' perceptions of their elected officials are at a record low. Only 28 percent view the federal government favorably. That was before the Senate voted down a bi-partisan agreement on universal background checks for gun buyers. 90 percent of the country favored passing that legislation, which many considered table stakes for any serious effort to thwart the spread of gun violence that continues to plague the country. Governing against the will of the people is sure to bring down approval ratings further. It may cost some politicians their jobs too. For all types of leaders, there's an important lesson ...

One memorable movie from the 1960s has crept back into my consciousness.  In the movie, two guys from California travel around the world for the better part of a year, surfing coastlines from Tahiti to South Africa, in search of the perfect wave. In August, they are in the Northern hemisphere; in December, south of the equator. It was their Endless Summer.

I am reminded of this movie nearly every year at this time when the budgeting process begins. No, not the federal budget… your budget. It begins sometime before the end of spring with strategic planning offsites or the ...

As a recognized discipline, change management has been in existence for over half a century. Yet despite the huge investment that companies have made in tools, training, and thousands of books (over 83,000 on Amazon), most studies still show a 60-70% failure rate for organizational change projects – a statistic that has stayed constant from the 1970's to the present.

Given this evidence, is it possible that everything we know about change management is wrong and that we need to go back to the drawing board? Should we abandon Kotter's eight success factors, Blanchard's moving cheese, and ...

Innovation is a talked-about topic today; many companies in our limping economy are seeking a new line of business, a new stream of revenue, the next "big thing" to help spur growth.  What can feel daunting is finding that next "blue ocean" where a major new business model awaits, like the pot of gold over the horizon.

But innovation doesn't have to be a "big idea", bet-the-farm kind of play that smart people in cool dark rooms dream up (and subsequently push the app to your smartphone).  Here's a story of innovation in a very traditional B2C business ...