leadership

Jim Whitehurst, President and CEO of Red Hat, Inc., recently shared his thoughts on leadership in business at the Marbles annual Big Idea Forum. He said, "For leaders to be truly effective, they're going to have to operate as catalysts. When you get into the details, it's subtle but it's incredibly important."  » Read more

Every year, Marbles in downtown Raleigh holds their annual Big Idea Forum. The lunchtime discussion aims to highlight ways corporate and community leaders shape organizations and people through inspiration and innovation.

Jim Whitehurst, President & CEO of Red Hat, Inc., opened up to Ron Wilder, a business author and executive coach, this past Wednesday, October 3rd, to talk about his big idea. » Read more

Chris Grams, partner and president of New Kind and author of The Ad-Free Brand, moderated our November 2011 Open Your World Forum webcast with Dries Buytaert and Michael Tiemann. You can read more about our speakers and how Linux and Drupal have evolved as two thriving open source communities in our webcast recap.

Here is an outline to the recording: » Read more

The need to empower natural leaders isn’t an HR pipedream, it’s a competitive imperative. But before you can empower them, you have to find them.

In most companies, the formal hierarchy is a matter of public record—it’s easy to discover who’s in charge of what. By contrast, natural leaders don’t appear on any organization chart. To hunt them down, you need to know . . . » Read more

I’ll bet you know a natural leader. Maybe you are one.

Maybe you’re a mom who started a support group for the parents of children with special needs.

Maybe you’re a concerned citizen who mobilized a group of preservation-minded neighbors to halt the destruction of a venerable old building.

Maybe you’re a churchgoer who convinced some of your fellow parishioners to help mentor at-risk kids.

Or maybe you simply organized your company’s first softball league. » Read more

When you ask children what they want to be when they are older, how many of them say they want to be a manager? I've certainly never met one who had such aspirations. In part this is because management is a pretty amorphous concept to a ten-year-old. But it's also because we adults aren't exactly singing the praises of the management profession either.  For example, in a 2008 Gallup poll on honesty and ethics among workers in 21 different professions, a mere 12 percent of respondents felt business executives had high/very high integrity--an all-time low. With a 37 percent low/very low rating, the executives came in behind lawyers, union leaders, real estate agents, building contractors, and bankers. » Read more

Every time there's an Open Your World Forum webcast, I mark my calendar. And every time, something comes up, and I miss the webcast. Fortunately for the absent-minded among us, you can get the webcasts on demand.

(Here's where I should also admit to having a short attention span--and loving the option to fast-forward!)

So this morning, I pulled up the Charlene Li webcast, Open Leadership. » Read more

“The knowledge and information that my children are getting through the formal education system--is it good enough for them to face the rapid advancements in science and technology?”

“Are my kids getting ready to face the rapid changes in social structure?”

“Are my children developing a solid foundation to be successful in a globalized world?”
» Read more

Whether you're a newly appointed manager or a weathered veteran, one thing's for certain: when it comes to leading the workforce of the future, the times they are a-changin'. The ability (and willingness) to understand and adapt to the new paradigms of working will separate the good managers from the great managers, and both from the clueless ones. » Read more