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Boringness: The Secret to Great Leadership HBR.org|Joel Stein Until recently, I hadn’t really known any great leaders. As a writer, the highest-ranking people I deal with are editors, and they’re pretty much just writers who have gotten lazy. The only thing an editor has ever led me into is a bar. So my images of leadership were based mainly on movies and sports. I figured great leaders did a lot of alpha-male yelling and inspirational speechmaking. To me, the epitome of leadership was when a baseball player is yelling at the umpire and about to get ejected and his manager runs out to the field to jump in front of him, so he can yell at the umpire and get thrown out of the game instead. In fact, I always thought baseball-team owners were awful people for not getting on the field in front of both the manager and player and getting ejected in their place. I may have felt this way because my favorite team was owned by George Steinbrenner. But after spending time with a range of leaders for my new book, Man Made: A Stupid Quest for Masculinity, I learned that my vision of what makes a good leader was all wrong. I spent hours working alongside fire chiefs, army captains, Boy Scout troop leaders, and others who guide teams. To my surprise, the best of them tended to be quiet listeners who let other people make most of the

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Putting Facebook in Perspective HBR.org|Mark Bonchek Every day brings some new bit of information — or hype — about social business. If you actively follow the social space, it’s easy to get caught in the never-ending stream. If you don’t, you may find all the talk about social overwhelming. So it’s useful to step back, gain some perspective and see the bigger picture. And it is a big picture. Communication revolutions like this have happened before, but you have to go back to Gutenberg in 1450 to find one as significant. Before Gutenberg’s printing press, monks laboriously produced written manuscripts and few people could read. The printing press changed all that, ushering in an era of mass communication. The combination of the Internet, social media, and mobile devices ushers in an era of mass collaboration. These new technologies allow anyone to connect to anyone and everyone, at any time — and there are already signs that the relationships we have with ourselves, with each other, and with our institutions are changing in response. We are still early in this social revolution, so exactly how these changes play out is yet to be determined. But the general outline is coming into view along six trajectories. As you read each one, ask yourself how well they apply to your organization or work. Your answers will tell you more about where you are in the social revolution than how many likes you have

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The Inexperience Advantage HBR.org|Daniel Gulati Ever been shut down by someone who supposedly knows more than you? It happens to me daily. I get denied by people that are more senior, more polished, and more knowledgeable than me. I’d be lying if I said I enjoyed professional rejection, but I try my best to dust myself off and move forward, reminding myself that that a series of controlled failures are necessary for eventual success. Not surprisingly, I’m not the only one getting ignored because of my inexperience, and the rejections can be downright vicious. Just last week, Kate called me in tears after attending a media conference with well-known industry bigwigs. After spending months anxiously anticipating meeting her professional heroes, she couldn’t have been more disheartened on the day of the event. Noting that she had been working in the industry for less than a year, most executives simply refused to engage in conversation with her, and the ones that did spoke to her in a condescending, suspicious manner that made her “feel like a kid who was inconveniencing a gathering of distinguished adults.” She flew home categorically disillusioned. As a proud supporter of the young, I was disgusted at the extent to which she was repeatedly shunned for, essentially, being too inexperienced. Yes, young and ambitious people with bright eyes and open hearts need to learn to accept the cold shoulder of established industry gatekeepers, even when it seems like the only goal of

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Great Businesses Don’t Start With a Plan HBR.org|Anthony K. Tjan You want to start a business. So you need a plan, right? No. Not really. As part of the research for a book I’m co-authoring — Heart, Smarts, Guts, and Luck, due out in August from HBR Press — my colleagues and I interviewed and surveyed hundreds of successful entrepreneurs around the globe to better understand what it takes to be an entrepreneur and build a really great business. One of our most striking findings was that of the entrepreneurs we surveyed who had a successful exit (that is, an IPO or sale to another firm), about 70% did NOT start with a business plan. Instead, their business journeys originated in a different place, a place we call the Heart. They were conceived not with a document but with a feeling and doing for an authentic vision. Clarity of purpose and passion ruled the day with less time spent writing about an idea and more time spent just doing it. It’s not that all planning is bad. It’s that efforts to write the “perfect” business plan usually lead to being precisely incorrect rather than approximately correct. One problem is that the content that most people focus on in business plans has little to do with the reality that will actually emerge. Many start-up plans emphasize some gigantic potential market and how getting just the smallest sliver of it will make them and

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You Are Not A Computer (Try As You May) HBR.org|Tony Schwartz Technology is meant to serve us. Instead it increasingly runs us — and runs us down. Where we put our focus shapes our agenda and defines our experience in every moment. More and more, we’re turning over this precious resource to our digital technology, allowing it to define the depth and span of our attention, and to seduce us into operating at such high speeds that we don’t notice the insidious toll that’s taking. I see it in myself, as I fight to stay focused on what’s most important, and to resist the urgent, addictive, Pavlovian pull of my digital devices. At times, I feel like a lab rat, mindlessly pushing levers in search of the next source of instant but fleeting gratification. I see it, too, in my colleagues and our corporate clients, each of them struggling to manage what feels more and more like a tsunami — information coming at us in wave after wave, threatening to overwhelm everything else in our lives. The Internet, and all it has come to include, is the most powerful interruption technology ever invented. It slices and dices our focus, fractures and distracts it, gives us less and less of more and more. It prompts us to skim, scan, and skip rather than immerse ourselves in any one thing. As the Nobel Prize winning economist Herbert Simon put it so presciently,

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How to Get Feedback When You’re the Boss HBR.org|Amy Gallo The higher up in the organization you get, the less likely you’ll receive constructive feedback on your ideas, performance, or strategy. No one wants to offend the boss, right? But without input, your development will suffer, you may become isolated, and you’re likely to miss out on hearing some great ideas. So, what can you do to get people to tell you what you may not want to hear? What the Experts Say Most people have good reasons for keeping their opinions from higher ups. “People with formal power can affect our fate in many ways — they can withhold critical resources, they can give us negative evaluations and hold us back from promotions, and they can even potentially fire us or have us fired,” says James Detert, associate professor at the Cornell Johnson Graduate School of Management and author of the Harvard Business Review articles “Debunking Four Myths About Employee Silence” and “Why Employees Are Afraid to Speak“. The more senior you become, the more likely you are to trigger this fear. “The major reason people don’t give the boss feedback is they’re worried that the boss will retaliate because they know that most of us have trouble accepting negative feedback,” says Linda Hill, the Wallace Brett Donham Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and coauthor of Being the Boss: The 3 Imperatives for Becoming a Great

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Find the Reverse Leaders in Your Midst HBR.org|Scott Edinger In the spirit of reverse innovation, and reverse mentoring, I submit to you that the next trend to watch out for in leadership is, you guessed it — reverse leadership. You’ve likely seen reverse leadership in action. It happens when someone not in a formal leadership role demonstrates great leadership ability: when a field service agent steps up with a solution to a persistent problem, for example; when a customer service rep inspires her colleagues through her exemplary customer-centric behavior. When an someone on an account team improves dramatically after being constructively coached by a fellow team member. Reverse leadership doesn’t replace regular leadership. Nor is it a sign that the official leaders in an organization are doing a bad job. Quite the contrary. Rarely does strong leadership ability show up at lower levels in the hierarchy if senior leaders aren’t very effective in their roles. Some reverse leaders are people quite content to remain individual contributors, like the scientist who has no interest in managing a team but cares deeply about the company’s mission. Others are young employees just approaching or on the first rungs of the formal leadership track. Still others have some leadership abilities but lack some vital element of leadership, like the sales professional who excels in creating strategy but doesn’t yet have the skills needed to manage a sales team. In my work with focus groups, interviews

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Coping with Email Overload HBR.org|Peter Bregman A few weeks ago, I returned from a week-long technology-free vacation with my family. No computer, no phone, no email. When I got to the office and checked my computer, I had hundreds of email messages waiting for me. I took a deep breath and started in on them. Three hours later, my inbox — a week’s worth of messages — was empty. Contrast that with my experience the next day, and each day after that, when I’ve spent well more than three hours each day on email. Some of that time involved back-and-forth emailing, but still, the difference is dramatic. I’ve come to the conclusion that I use email to distract myself. Whenever I feel the least bit uneasy, I check my email. Stuck while writing an article? Bored on a phone call? Standing in an elevator, frustrated in a meeting, anxious about an interaction? Might as well check email. It’s an ever-present, easy-access way to avoid my feelings of discomfort. What makes it so compelling is that it’s so compelling. I wonder what’s waiting for me in my inbox? It’s scintillating. It also feels legitimate, even responsible. I’m working. I need to make sure I don’t miss an important message or fail to respond in a timely fashion. But it’s become a serious problem. When we don’t control our email habit, we are controlled by it. Everyone I know complains about email

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