It is time to offer a New Year’s list of recommended additions to your daily reading list – sources that have found their way firmly on to mine over the past year or more. These all have clear staying power, offering value that is both thought-provoking and actionable.

I hope you will bookmark this page and give them all a thorough visit over the next week or so. I am confident you’ll be glad you did.

Here they are, in random order:

• All Things Workplace, by Steve Roesler.
• Three Star Leadership Blog, by Wally Bock.
• Eclecticity, by Doug Fine.
• Cultural Offering, by Kurt Harden.
• Mapping Company Success, by Miki Saxon
• The Frog Blog, by Fred H. Schlegel.
• Execupundit.com, by Michael Wade.
• The Delaware Employment Law Blog, authored principally by Molly DiBianca.
• Great Leadership: by Dan McCarthy
• The Human Workplace, by Shaun Kieran
• Aspire, by Mary Jo Asmus.
• Work Matters, by Bob Sutton

Please do enjoy, and use these terrific resources to help fuel a productive, rewarding, and profitable New Year for you all.

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Note: Speaking of lists of regular reading, Managing Leadership is proud to have been included among a list of “insightful leadership blogs” compiled by the very gracious J.D. Meier, author of Sources of Insight. Please stop over to see the really very excellent collection of superb reading he has put together.

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If you have enjoyed this post, please do join us by using the subscription links just below or at the top right of this page. And thanks – we look forward to your being aboard!

As noted here every year, easily one of the most gratifying aspects of authoring a site like this is the interaction offered by visitors from around the world. They present thoughtful and engaging comments from which we all learn so much, as well as offering us the opportunity to discover additional value on many of the contributors’ own web sites.

Below please find, in no particular order, the many fine thinkers who, over the past year, were kind enough to visit these pages, and gracious enough to offer their views for our consideration (with embedded links to their own sites where provided):

• E.
• Anna Smith
• Fred H. Schlegel
• Ryan
• David Burkus
• Christopher Hazen
• “Theories of Leadership“
• Kelleen
• Miki Saxom
• Rachel Clarkson
• Katy
• Wally Bock
• Pablo
• Eric

Many thanks to all of you, and best wishes to you and to all our visitors for the Holidays and the New Year. See you again then!

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Did you know you can read these posts, and any other at this site, on your mobile device? Specially formatted pages, more quickly downloaded and easily read, will open on your internet-capable phone when you navigate here (don’t forget to bookmark it!). Also, you can switch back and forth between standard and mobile views. Give it a try!

But before you go, please take a moment to subscribe, either by email or RSS reader, to be sure you receive future articles right here as well, as they’re published.

As an American living overseas, it can be difficult to keep in touch with the thinking and mood of my home country, and of what elsewhere in the world is attracting attention there. But the internet sure helps in this regard. My daily routine includes a scan of many more sources than are reflected below, not to mention a regular assortment of high-quality blogs. But these are some of the most striking examples of the value of the web I’ve found in the past several weeks:

The WSJ. The full paper is a daily online exercise, and one that is worth every engaging minute. Aside from the reliable news, disciplined analysis, and comprehensive viewpoints on offer, are many gems such as these:

• Speaking of living overseas, please see this terrific piece by Joe Queenan about the insufferably ephemeral patriotism of a certain, sadly prominent, class of American expatriots.
• As an earnest whistler alone in a culture that dismisses it as unserious, I found myself thoroughly in sympathy with this essay on the fading away of whistling even in the West.
• Speaking of frivolous behavior, did you know it’s actually productivity-enhancing? Please see this brief but thought-provoking piece on water-cooler power.
• Finally, speaking of being thankful, I certainly am that our country, of which we and others so often prematurely despair, still produces such as this young American soldier.

The Economist. The breadth of the reporting categories united by a brilliantly focused economic perspective makes this a weekly must-read. Always carefully-argued and well-written, you will find yourself benefiting from being challenged even where you don’t agree. Here are just a few examples of what has proven especially eye-catching recently:

• One of the greatest features of this magazine is the brilliant weekly obituary. This one is about the passing of Indian poet and publisher P. Lal – his life and work, how these enter into and emerge from context of his culture, and how this speaks to all of us in the contexts of our own.
• One of the benefits of a weekly magazine is the careful thinking that can be applied to conceiving a piece, the bias on analysis over simple reporting. Please see this eye-opener on why China may not be the indispensable economy after all.
• Speaking of China, while we contemplate the nature of the economic tectonics roiling the world today, and their meaning to the continued virtues and values of our own society, you may want to see this piece about the new global topography of demographics and entrepreneurial activity.
• And speaking of coming to grips with new understandings of the world, as if astrophysics wasn’t problematic enough, it turns out that the laws of physics may be local. This sort of insight speaks volumes about not only the facts of our lives, but the meaning as well. Take a look.

Here and there.

• The Harvard Business School on why star-power may not be portable. This is a no-brainer, but it seems that nothing is official, doesn’t it, until a source like this pronounces on the subject.
• Speaking of the arrogant assumption of insight, it turns out that bees have more computing power than even our best computers. And they also seem to be at the top of their game in the morning.
• As we’ve seen, some laws of physics may vary across regions of the universe. But, evidently, not those unearthed by Einstein. Popular Mechanics explains what some of these are and, just as interestingly, how they were tested.
• Here are a couple of NY Times pieces for you: This one argues for a return to “sound” money, instead of just the endless printing of it that seems to be in vogue lately. And here we learn that one key to a happy workplace is to fire unhappy employees.

America’s Finest News Source. It doesn’t, of course, report the actual news, but the Onion can be surprisingly and refreshingly insightful. Here are just two examples of how:

• Historians admit to inventing ancient Greeks, and
• I’m prepared to give my life for this or any country.

Happy Thanksgiving to all of you, from America or any country, wherever you may be. See you next week.

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This article has been cross-posted on Managing Meanings.

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If you look at the contents section on the sidebar of the main page of this site, you will see a listing of the article series that have been published here. You can click through to view summaries of the pieces, and then read the full series or selections that are of most interest to you. Enjoy! (And don’t forget to subscribe, while you’re over there!)

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Technorati Tags: American, internet, news, analysis, Joe Queenan, expatriot, productivity, perspective, P. Lal, culture, China, demographics, entrepreneur, astrophysics, physics, insight, Harvard, Einstein, NY Times, workplace, Onion, WSJ, Economist

This site suffered a catastrophic collapse earlier this month, and neither the host nor the blog platform experts were able to resolve it. As a consequence, it ultimately proved necessary to delete the entire blog and reload it from a backup which, fortunately, was made two months ago. Nevertheless, all pages other than the home page, and all posts other than those on it, have been lost. These will be re-posted over the coming months, starting with the key posts identified on the right column.

But first, the posts published since the crash will be re-uploaded over the next several days, after which I will finally publish a book review I have been looking forward to offering. We will then return to the discussion that had been underway, an elaboration of the argument against individual leadership in modern organizations.

In the meanwhile, thank you all for your patience. Please do be sure to contact me with any broken links or the like resulting from the reset that you are particularly interested in seeing restored.

Thanks again – see you soon!

Events drive others until you prioritize, imposing some degree of control on their flow and on the degree to which that affects you – or, better yet, reversing the direction of that influence. In my case, a re-prioritization was called for by events of late last year, and one of the events affected by it is the publishing schedule of this blog.

I long worked to present an essay or item a workday here. As it happens, I will not be able to maintain that. I am and will continue to review the means by which I get my message out, and this blog will remain an important part of the effort. But it will not be the venue for that every day or, even, regularly.

What will happen here is a periodic, probably once a week, commentary on current events in business and management, as well as in the perversely fascinating dialogue in these realms about individual leadership. This will sometimes take the form of a series of articles, as in the past; indeed, we are still in the midst of one that has another two or three essays in it.

Just as often, though, it will take the form of direct observations about a news item, another author’s views on a topic of interest here, or commentary on the latest drivel to drool out of the sundry schools of leadership “science,” which, despite ever-accumulating evidence of their irrelevance or, even, destructiveness, continue to assert their primacy and, sadly, to attract subscribers among we presumptively level-headed practitioners. Book reviews will also continue to be conducted here, as well as a “roundup” now and then.

So, I hope you will continue to keep this blog in your RSS reader or email subscription list, and stop by to view and participate in the discussion. Thanks for your support over the past 5 years or so – I will continue to work to earn it over the increasingly interesting years ahead.

It is time to offer a list of recommended additions to your daily reading list – sources that have found their way firmly on to mine over the past year. Some have clear staying power, and others are new, but promise to be keepers.

I hope you will bookmark this page and give them all a thorough visit over the next week or so. I am confident you’ll be glad you did.

Here they are, in random order:

• All Things Workplace, by Steve Roesler.
• Chaos Scenario: Cam Beck, Paul Herring, and John Herrington.
• The Delaware Employment Law Blog, authored principally by Molly DiBianca.
• Execupundit.com, by Michael Wade.
• Great Leadership: by Dan McCarthy.
• KnowHR, by Frank Roche and Sarah Chambers.
• The Word on Employment Law with John Phillips.
• Three Star Leadership Blog, by Wally Bock.
• Eclecticity, by Doug Fine.
• Cultural Offering, by Kurt Harden.
• Mapping Company Success, by Miki Saxon
• The Frog Blog, by Fred H. Schlegel.
• The Spring Point Services Blog, by Shaun Kieran
• Aspire, by Mary Jo Asmus.

Please do enjoy, and use these terrific resources to help fuel a productive, rewarding, and profitable New Year for you all.

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And while you’re subscribing to those, please do take a moment as well to subscribe, either by email or RSS reader, to Managing Leadership, to be sure you receive future articles as they’re published.

Easily one of the most gratifying aspects of authoring a site like this is the interaction offered by visitors from around the world. They present thoughtful and engaging comments from which we all learn so much, not least of which, often enough, are the contributors’ own web sites.

Below please find, in no particular order, the many fine thinkers who, over the past year, were kind enough to visit these pages, and gracious enough to offer their views for our consideration (with embedded links to their own sites where provided):

• Mike King
• Steve Roesler
• Miki
• Essa Parwani
• Nina Simosko
• Dan McCarthy
• E.
• Gannon Beck
• Wally Bock
• Shaun Kieran
• Lee Thayer
• John Phillips
• Rob Jacobs
• Cam Beck
• Hayli @ Rise Smart
• Vic
• Craig Sellars
• Jamie Notter
• Allen Adams
• Peter Gluck
• Ben Simonton
• Randy Hall
• Fred H Schlegel
• M B Wheatley
• Oscar Derrida
• cv harquail
• Zac Parsons
• Edward Brown
• Mike Myatt
• Anthony P
• Andrew Smith
• Ian Pratt
• Lead with Love
• Dr. Al
• Michael Leiter
• Aleksandar M. Velkoski
• Bob Foster
• Nick McCormick
• Chris Edgar | Purpose Power Coaching
• Allen Adams
• Becky Robinson
• Rune Kvist Olsen

Many thanks to all of you, and best wishes to you and to all our visitors for the Holidays and the New Year. See you again then!

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Please do take a moment to subscribe, either by email or RSS reader, to be sure you receive future articles as they’re published.

From nearly the beginning, we have struggled to understand how the world around us works. But for all that we have a naturally inquisitive nature, this has never been about artless curiosity or pure research – we want to discover the mechanisms driving cause to effect. We want access to the levers of the former, and to be less at the mercy of the latter.

We want to be in control. At the very least, we want to feel like we can comprehend the landscape, and safely navigate our way through it.

Inevitably, as we posit this or that model for explaining this mysterious and frightening universe that daily reveals our utter misapprehension of and witless dependence on it, we turn to the questions of who we are, what is the meaning of our existence, what does the future hold. Marcus Aurelius, in The Meditations, touched on the centrality of this concern for us:

In a word, if there is a god, all is well; and if chance rules, do not thou also be governed by it.”

The interesting thing about this quote is the power it has to bring us all on board, to help us accept the wisdom that we will or can progress, and that we must or ought to live moral and meaningful lives.

But the question will not so easily be evaded. After all, what if chance really does rule? If it does, then why on earth shouldn’t we also be guided by it? Why shouldn’t we order our lives on the presumption that we are little other than the surplus energy thrown off by the coincidental congregation of so many particles randomly – in accordance with purely mechanical rules, but animated by chance encounters – triggering attractions, repulsions, spins, charges, and who knows or cares what else among themselves?

What if it all is really just that? What if Bach‘s Goldberg Variations performed by Glenn Gould that I’m listening to as I write are, in the actual grand scheme of things, the meaningless detritus sloughing away from the quantumly chaotic meshing and unmeshing of the gears of the real world?

What if Bach’s inspiration means little more than that he happened to have been composed of this set of particles in those conditions at that particular time? What if Gould’s interpretation is little more than a pale mockery of the concept of quantum entanglement – attempting to activate it across time? And the joy I take in listening to this magic – what if it really is just that: smoke emanating from an entirely unrelated source; mirrors distorting a reality I imagine this music to be helping me divine beneath the surface of things?

That’s why Aurelius’s words are so gripping for us – even calming. Because we can’t imagine that there is no wisdom in them. There really is no reason to believe that chance rules – or, perhaps, that it inevitably always will. There is too much force in our irrepressible insistence that we do – or can – mean more than that.

In the end, we’ll all be left with little alternative but to accept whatever truth reveals itself to us – that’s not the issue here. The issue is that whatever forces are at play around us, to whatever end, and with whatever relation to us, we are able to define ourselves, to make our own meaning, and to derive and develop our understanding of value from that – to create our own landscape and chart our own course through it.

Plenty to be thankful for in that.

See you next week.

Technorati Tags: universe, Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, wisdom, progress, Bach, Goldberg Variations, Glenn Gould, quantum entanglement, reality

Today marks the 234^th birthday of the United States Marine Corps. It is an occasion for Marines to honor those who have built the legendary reputation of the Corps with their blood and spirit, and for those in uniform today to contemplate their role in bearing its brilliant battle flags aloft into the future.

It also often is an occasion for the rest of us to wonder at this magnificent band of brothers – its incomparable combat record, its fierce loyalty and irresistible esprit de corps, its unrelentingly focused dynamism and invention. How do they do that? Generation after generation? In particular, how do such young Americans, so many still in their teens, shoulder such crushingly mighty burdens with such martial aplomb and dignified competence?

That’s a pretty good question. In fact, it’s the type that drives a lot of thinking and writing in many fields, not least among them our own of management. For example, few subjects have attracted more attention of this sort than that of innovation. What is its secret? Who are these innovators, and how do they work such magic, transforming the very landscape beneath our feet, revealing new possibilities for us to unfold into new futures?

Peter Drucker directed his trademark clarity and insightful common sense onto the topic in his classic “Innovation and Entrepreneurship.” And one of the things he said is that it is not a phenomenon that exists in isolation. It cannot be explained in terms that refer only back onto itself. Attempting to do this, he said, is like trying to imagine a mountaintop without a mountain, an edge without a knife.

Many of us use the image of a menacingly bright, razor-sharp knife edge to describe our Marines. Others among us sometimes depict their revolutionarily forward-looking and transformational culture in terms of lofty peaks reaching dizzying heights.

But we would do well to recall that what gives their edge its shape, power, and resilience is us; we Americans of all sorts are the blade around which this edge folds, drawing into itself strength, form, and purpose. What gives their regimental values and communal self-sacrifice elevation, scope, and perspective is the great, vast, free society inevitably generating the ever-rising social terrain through which these majestic warriors ascend to their posts.

They are us, these Marines. They seem incomprehensibly unique, marching to a drumbeat so different we can’t make it out. But the drummer is us. The beat rises and gathers its rhythm from all of our hearts, our hopes, struggles, and ambitions for ourselves and the futures of our children and our community.

These Marines are at the summit of our martial spirit and power. But the mountain is us. When you wish them “happy birthday” today, feel your chest swell all the more with pride for that.

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Technorati Tags: United States, Marine Corps, Marine, Corps, esprit de corps, dynamism, invention, American, competence, management, innovation, innovator, Marines, culture, perspective, Peter Drucker

It is said that Samurai warriors trained specifically to not fear death, in order to clear the way to victory. In a perverse sort of way, that sounds magnificently martial. But it’s wrong. Whether you fear failure, or purge yourself of that fear, you are focusing on yourself, and not the fight into which you enter.

So, what do you do? Do you concentrate instead on success? Does positive thinking alone drive you to victory? That’s better, but it can unravel with disturbing rapidity if you meet jarring setbacks along the way. Somehow, the problem here is that your own person – your psyche, reputation, ambitions, and inevitably, your fears – still interpenetrate everything you do.

In his WSJ column today, Fouad Ajami used the phrase “He fears failure . . . and nothing more.” How about us? Is there nothing more for us, nothing more that we care about?

There is.

However confused we become in times of transient ease about what it may be, they pass, and we rediscover what we do it all for. We may have strayed from this awareness in our personal lives, our careers, in our citizenship. But sometimes when it is under threat, when we are in danger of losing it, it becomes desperately easier to make out. We can see it. We can see little else.

We march toward the sound of the guns, throwing ourselves into the battle to save what matters more, what matters most, to all of us. Our fear of failure is submerged in our commitment to an infinitely greater cause.

We forget ourselves, our own fate, clearing the way to victory. In our personal lives, our work, in our citizenship.

Don’t we? I’m convinced that we do. How about you?

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Today’s tip: And how about today’s youth, barely old enough – just barely – to understand the event that we remember today? Well, please see the WSJ again for what Peggy Noonan discovered in several conversations with these young Americans.

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Note: The book review originally scheduled for today will be published on Monday. We’ll then return to our discussion of what matters more to us than us, if anything, at work.

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Technorati Tags: warrior, death, victory, failure, success, positive thinking, reputation, ambition, WSJ, Fouad Ajami, career, citizenship, threat, commitment, Peggy Noonan, American