The Chief Happiness Officer Blog

Category: Leadership

Leadership is an insanely important discipline. Here you’ll find the thought, tools and tricks of the trade of great leaders.

  • Leadership

    Last tuesday I hosted a conversation circle on leadership at Arena, and as always it was a great experience. We were a very diverse group, and we had a deep, meaningful conversation on the nature and challenges of leadership.

    One question I was particularly interested in exploring was the role of leadership. What is it that leadership does in organizations and in the world? What is that happens beacuse of leaders, that would not otherwise have happened. In short, “Leadership, what is good for?”. This question is interesting to me, because it examines leadership from the outside. It’s not about trying to understand leaders, or about defining good or bad leadership. It’s an examination of the role that leadership plays. If you have any ideas on this, or any references to information, I’d love to hear about it.

    After this conversation, I was particularly pleased to see that Fast Company have yet another excellent article on leadership, this time by Ronald Heifetz of Harvard.
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  • Disney and creativity

    This article has a brief outline of the Disney-method for evaluating and developing ideas. The method is inspired by the fact, that Walt Disney could play three different roles, when ideas were tossed around the Disney offices: He could be the dreamer, the critic or the realist. And all three roles are vital when new ideas are developed, but ideally you need them in the right order.

    If you criticize an idea to soon, it’s too easy to kill it off. You need to build the idea up a little first, then become critical. However, if you don’t think critically about your idea, you have no idea of whether it will stand up. Finally, you need to be realistic: Is there something good in this idea.

    I have a principle that I try to stick to: Whenever I hear of a new idea for the first time, I always say that it’s a good idea, and try to find the reasons why it’s good. I may off-hand be able to think of a hundred reasons why it’s a bad idea, but I save those for later. Build the idea up first – then try to shoot it down.

  • The Art of Hosting Good Conversations Online

    I took a spin on the net looking for material on hosting, which was made kinda difficult by the fact that in an internet context, hosting most often means the technical hosting of an application or a site on a server somewhere. Anyway, one interesting link I did find was an article by Howard Rheingold called The Art of Hosting Good Conversations Online.

    This fits extremely well with the ideas on hosting that I’m trying to develop, and almost all the points made apply to both online and offline hosting. Excellent stuff!

  • Interpersonal relations at work

    If you think that all these modern, “soft” management theories of organizational democracy, including people in the decisions and being open comes from a few addle-headed idealists, you should read this article.

    Among other subjects, it talks about W.E. Deming, who “was a hard-headed scientist who arrived at a position that focused on the importance of respect for everyone in the organization and of good communication among them all.” The point being of course, that he was was a theoretician not known for his warmth or gentleness, and he arrived at his conclusions using hard-core scientific and statistical methods. So there!

  • Hosting

    Having just spent three days in Slovenia exploring the art of hosting, I thought I’d write a little about what hosting means to me.

    Basically, every time you invite somebody to be a part of something, you’re assuming the role of host. Whether it’s a meeting, a conference, a project, a party, a lecture or a night out with the boys: Any time you gather people, you assume the role of host. So what makes the concept of hosting so interesting?
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  • Chaordic leadership

    While going through my bookmarks, I came across this article, where Dee Hock, the founder of VISA, explains his ideas of chaordic organization and leaderhip.

    Here’s a sample from the article, that talks about when organizations achieve peak performance:
    Every choreographer, conductor, and coach — or for that matter, corporation president — has tried to distill the essence of such performance. Countless others have tried to explain and produce a mechanistic, measurably controlled process that will cause the phenomenon. It has never been done and it never will be. It is easily observed, universally admired, and occasionally experienced. It happens, but cannot be deliberately done. It is rarely long sustained but can be repeated. It arises from the relationships and interaction of those from which it is composed. Some organizations seem consistently able to do so, just as some leaders seem able to cause it to happen with consistency, even within different organizations.

    If this speaks to you, then you need to read Dee Hocks book “birth of the chaordic age”.

  • Conversation ideas at work

    The CEO Refresher has an article that suggests ten conversation topics in organizations. This builds on the idea, that conversations are the way that human beings think together, as explored by Margaret Wheatley in Turning to one another.

    An excellent way to conduct the discussions, would be circles of conversation. This is a very simple method that promotes deep discussion and deep listening.

  • Meeting Meg

    Last night I had the pleasure of meeting Margaret Wheatley (or simply Meg) for the first time. I was part of a circle conversation about leadership, arranged by my good friend Carsten Ohm. Meg is the author of (among others) A simpler way and Turning to one another.

    We had a very diverse group in the circle, and as always the discussion was deep and intense. Megs presence gave the discussion an added dimension, because she could use her background and experience to point out the deeper roots of the discussion at a few critical points.

    We started from the definition of a leader, that they use in the Berkana Institute, namely that a leader is someone who wants to help (or someone who wants to contribute to positive change).
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  • Quote

    Perhaps it is the hedonist in me, but I believe that gatherings designed to achieve useful results can only be fully effective when the participants are having fun. The issues on the table, and the implications of the outcome, may all be deadly serious, but creative interchange, to say nothing of innovative results, seems to disappear quickly when a dark cloud of solemnity hangs over everything.

    – Harrison Owen in Expanding our now.

  • Free books on leadership

    Questia.com are putting a lot of free books and articles on the net, and this week the focus is on leadership. Here are their prime picks in that category.