Kindness Counts in Leadership

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by Mary Anne Amato | January 3, 2019

At our recent holiday celebration, our CEO, David Wan, shared a story of a teacher who made a tremendous difference in his life. Many of us listening also had been the recipient of a stellar teacher who went out of their way to make a difference in our lives. But this story was a bit different: It was told through the lens of kindness. At the end of his remarks, David challenged us – people who design and develop leaders for a living – to help build kinder leaders because the world really needs them right now. I’ve been pondering […]

Everyone Plays a Role in Change

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by Janice Molloy | December 18, 2018

I recently went through a major life change: after working as a contractor for six years, I’ve rejoined the ranks of full-time employees. As I’ve rejiggered my daily routines—no more lingering over a cup of coffee if I want to beat the traffic—I’ve been reminded of a line in our recently updated Change Management topic in Harvard ManageMentor:   “Change requires adopting new practices and behaviors and letting go of those that no longer serve their purpose.” For my transition to succeed, everyone in my family—including the dogs—had to shift their behavior to some degree. And that’s what organizational change, large and […]

Navigating Complexity: Managing Polarities

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by Larry Clark | December 17, 2018

Updated on March 5, 2024. This is the second in a three-part series on how leaders can effectively navigate the complexity of today’s business world for their organizations. Read the first post here. In a previous post, I shared that navigating complexity requires us to trade in our traditional cause-and-effect, problem-solving mindset map for something that accurately depicts the new territory of complexity. Today, I want to dig into one of the best examples of the new territory—managing polarities. Thinking in terms of polarities is a critical shift leaders need to make to navigate complexity, and it is an important […]

Reflecting on eLearning Guild’s DevLearn 2018

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by Louise Axon | December 6, 2018

My colleague, Jen, and I recently attended DevLearn 2018, eLearning Guild’s massive two and a half day-long learning conference. With over 3,800 attendees and more than 200 learning sessions, the event was incredibly active and covered a variety of topics and interests – all technology focused to some degree. The two keynotes, Julie Snyder, co-creator and executive producer of the viral podcast, Serial, and Lynda Barry, artist, educator, and author (What It Is), both offered uniquely interesting perspectives you normally wouldn’t associate with tech: storytelling and creativity. As learning designers, I found a few of their main points to be […]

Navigating Complexity: A New Map for a New Territory

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by Larry Clark | November 28, 2018

This is the first in a three-part series on how leaders can effectively navigate the complexity of today’s business world for their organizations. It’s an odd fact that, in the U.S., the most common street name is Second Street, appearing in 10,866 U.S. municipalities, according to the National League of Cities. (First Street is the third most common, at just over 9,000 occurrences — go figure).  As luck would have it, I recently had to navigate to an address on Second Street in a nearby city. Not paying close attention to the search results in my GPS, I selected a […]