“So here’s the thing. Flight, taxes, death – they’re all connected to this event” explains the cheery video for the National Funeral Directors Association Leadership Conference 2021. The bad news is that the deadline to attend the event has now expired. The good news is that there’s still time to book for the 2022 event […]
Tag: leadership
“Big Men” in leadership roles [new study]
How does body weight and size affect the perceived persuasiveness of ‘leaders’ (when the ‘leader’ is a man) ? This question has recently been examined by three professors from the Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management, Cornell University, US. Professor Kevin Kniffin and Professor Vicki Bogan, along with faculty colleague Professor David Just (also now at […]
Comparing ‘The Leadership Hubris Epidemic’ and Frontotemporal Dementia
What comparisons might be drawn, if any, between the grotesquely exaggerated, often self-destructive personality traits caused by damage to frontal brain regions and the behaviour of prominent characters in the world of business and politics who are suffering from ‘The Hubris Syndrome’? Details are provided in Chapter 1 of the 2107 book ‘The Leadership Hubris Epidemic’ […]
Dirty Hands Make Dirty Leaders? (study)
Florien Cramwinckel Msc (Utrecht University, The Netherlands) researches how people respond to the moral behavior of others. As part of this remit, an experiment was devised in which 78 participants demonstrated how dirtiness versus cleanliness might influence moral behavior in leader–subordinate relationships :- “They were asked touch, smell, and evaluate a dirty (fake poop) or […]
The Logic of Absurdity – and the puzzle of leadership irrelevance
“Leaders are often thought to be instrumental to the performance of the organizations they lead. However, considerable research suggests that their influence over organizational performance might actually be minimal. These claims of leader irrelevance pose a puzzle: If leaders are relatively insignificant, why would someone commit to leading?” Taking steps towards explaining the puzzle, Daniel […]
Leaders’ inspirational appeal increases post-mortem (new study)
“There is a great deal of interest in understanding what leaders can do to increase their charisma.” And a radical new concept on charisma-enhancement is presented in The Leadership Quarterly, Sept. 2016 – sadly for aspiring leaders, it involves their death. “In the present research, we seek to advance our understanding of the nature and […]
Springtime for Hitler : Lessons for Leadership
Even though Hitler may have been a megalomaniac drug-addled psychopathic narcissist, the question can still be asked: “What lessons can we learn from his approach to leadership?” Answers are provided by Professor Hershey H. Friedman (Department of Finance and Business Management, School of Business, Brooklyn College, The City University of New York) and Professor Linda […]
Leadership and Gardening – an update
Following on from our Improbable note about Leadership via Gardening, may we also draw attention to the work of Dr. Thorsten Grahn (of Regent University, Virginia Beach, US) who not only considers the analogies between gardening and organizational leadership but is also one of the very few organizational observers to have examined the leadership implications […]
Randomness As a Tool to Produce More Women Leaders
Further fodder for using randomness to make choices that are traditionally made by other, judgment-based methods: “Women have to enter the leadership race to win: Using random selection to increase the supply of women into senior positions,” Amanda H. Goodall [pictured here] and Margit Osterloh, 2015. The authors, at Cass Business School, City University, London and the University […]
Leadership courses – “Why horses?”
There are a fair number [1][2][3][4][5][6][7] of opportunities for those who’d like to explore the possibilities of enhancing their leadership skills with the help of horses. But, those who follow the world of equine-assisted team and leadership development paradigms might have asked themselves, at some stage, the simple yet all-important question : ‘Why horses?’ If […]