All Posts Tagged With: "Leadership"

When I saw the most inspirational leader of modern times on the cover page of Time Magazine (July 2008) sharing his Secrets of Leadership, even though Nelson Mandela is 90 years old and retired last century in 1999, I had to pick it up and spend the €4.20.
I bought Time, not because I expected a great insight [...]

I first heard this phrase from my good friend and sometime mentor, Danny McNulty, when we worked together at Cable & Wireless. You may have heard of the book What They Don’t Teach You At Harvard Business School by Mark H McCormack, well, just like McCormack, Danny is full of tried and tested management techniques and [...]

On Monday the 23rd June, Dr. James E. Hansen, a physicist of the Columbia University Earth Institute, testified to Congress about global warming, 20 years after his June 23, 1988 testimony, which alerted the public that global warming was under way. He states that there are striking similarities between then and now, but one big difference. Read [...]

According to a new online study from Reuters, evaluating the characteristics of 25,000 American adults, avid technology consumers tended to score highly in personality traits such as leadership, dynamism and assertiveness — but low in modesty.
Perhaps this helps to explain why technologists seem to think that every business (and world politics) problem has a technology solution, [...]

Large Corporations innovate badly if left to their own devices. The attributes that make large corporates able to operate at scale effectively, mitigate against innovation. Too much bureaucracy, too many rules, and a culture of fitting in with the team make innovative action a rare event in a typical corporate. So how do companies like Cisco, [...]

I clearly remember as a wet-behind-the-ears youth complaining bitterly to my old boss, David Williams, that I was too busy and could never manage to complete everything that needed to be done. He laughed, collected a piece of that old fashioned green line-printer paper and sat down. He said:
“This is the most important lesson that you will [...]

Leading publication to work with Steve O’Donnell, Green IT guru and SVP IT Infrastructure & Operations at First Data International, the world’s largest provider of merchant processing services, and formerly head of BT’s global data centre business.
Data Centre Solutions (DCS), the only pan-European magazine focusing on the seven critical areas of data centre management – applications, [...]

Practicing the art of Management By Wandering Around (MBWA), has been my habit ever since reading In Search of Excellence in the early 80’s, when two McKinsey Consultants Tom Peters and Robert Waterman Jr. publicized this highly effective management technique they uncovered at Hewlett-Packard.
The basic principle is that command and control management is ineffective. Managers who rely on [...]

My little brother Laurie O’Donnell who is a top man in the Education world, (winner of the George Lucas Education Foundation Global Six) was asked to speak to a group recently on the subject of leadership and identify some top tips for aspiring leaders. Here is what he came up with:

Be a lifelong learner - as soon as [...]