There was interesting news out of the annual meeting of the International Astronomical Union in  Rio De Janeiro this month.   No, not the discovery of a new exoplanet or red complex galaxies, but rather a growing concern that “managerialism” may kill the golden age of astronomical discovery.(http://www.economist.com/sciencetechnology/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14209662)  As telescopes become bigger and more expensive, management techniques have been [...]

Those of us engaged in organizational research are humble creatures.  We live in a world of probabilities, where achieving significant correlations of .4 or .5 delight us – where if we explain 25% of the variance, we’ve achieved something and where we try to do better than random prediction.  We ask people their observations (”To what [...]

I found a comment from George Schultz (recent interview with Charlie Rose – see video) particularly interesting:
Sometimes change happens simply because the leader thinks it can happen.
He was referring to the fall of the Berlin Wall 20 years ago and the impact of Reagan’s optimism and Gorbachev’s open-mindedness.  I often wonder if optimism is a [...]

The challenge to all of us who work with executives is that maybe they don’t matter so much.  Studies show the effect of CEOs on firm performance to range from 4.5-12.8%.  It’s as Napoleon said, “Luck is the most essential ingredient of good generalship.”
Read more:  http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200906/steve-jobs