You are the leader!

Leadership? You? Isn’t that just for the top of the ‘food chain’? You just want an entry-level job, a promotion to the next rung, or to simply keep your job in tight times, right? In today’s corporate world, you think to yourself, you’ll be lucky to get to a leadership position in the next five years. Wrong! If leadership is not the most overused and misunderstood word, then it certainly ranks in the top ten in today’s corporate corridors. It’s time to set the record straight.

In my book, The Offsite: A Leadership Challenge Fable, Gwen, a key character, learns leadership is not about title or position or being the decider - that’s positional authority. It’s not about knowing it all, creating a fearful atmosphere, or getting obedience from others. Real leadership is about collaboration, asking questions that promote learning, and creating an atmosphere of innovation. And, she also learns, real leadership is for everyone. Moreover, it can be honed with practice, but it starts internally and grows from there.

Gwen comes to understand real leadership is a way of life. It is a choice about creating open, honest, authentic relationships that urge others to want to discover their power and focus on what matters to them and their community. It is about knowing what matters to you and what you want from your life, not just your job. Gwen learns real leaders ask, “what do I want my life to look like today” not, “what do I have to do today”. Big difference.

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‘Jam’ begins to pay off

It’s one thing to get thousands of people together to brainstorm and quite another to translate what came out of it into profitable business. IBM’s, rather the largest ever innovation exercise, that started in 2001, and a follow up jam session in 2006 to translate the outcome into business ideas, seems to b paying off.

In an article titled ‘An Inside View of IBM's Innovation Jam’ Osvald M. Bjelland, chairman and founder of Xyntéo Ltd and Robert Chapman Wood, professor of strategic management at San José State University, in the latest issue of MIT Sloan Review, say that “The Jam was successful to a considerable degree. It uncovered, solved problems in and mobilized support for substantial new ways of using IBM technology.” The process involved 150,000 IBM employees, family members, business partners, clients (from 67 companies) and university researchers. Participants Jammed from 104 countries, and conversations continued 24 hours a day. Incidentally, "Jam" was IBM's term for a "massively parallel conference" online.

Here’s a list of businesses to come out of the Jam process:

Smart Health Care Payment Systems: Overhauling health care payment and management systems through the use of small personal devices (such as smart cards) that will automatically trigger financial transactions, the processing of insurance claims and the updating of electronic health records. This business has "graduated" from the in cubator stage, and its products are now part of the IBM Healthcare Industry Solutions product offering.

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Demystifying virtualization

Simply put, Virtualization is about sharing resources of a single computer across multiple environments and users. Virtualization helps increase the utilization and flexibility of hardware by making it possible to run multiple operating systems and multiple applications on the same computer at the same time. A more radical way of thinking is of virtualization as a method that allows you to transform hardware into software.

Anyone who uses a computer can benefi t from virtualization. It saves time, money, energy and helps people achieve morewith the computer hardware they already own. Software such as VMware ESX helps transform or virtualize the hardware resources of a computer including the CPU, RAM, hard disk and network controller to create a fully functional virtual machine. Multiple virtual machines share hardware resources without interfering with each other so that several operating systems and applications can be run at the same time on a single computer.

For small to mid size organizations, there are several benefits of virtualization that are direct and upfront – reduce costs of IT staff, get a service provider to remotely provision a range of services covering hardware, storage, backups, content filtering, patch management, license management, information security and several other such everyday uses priced as utility bundles from a managed service provider. The biggest benefit will be that of having enterprise class IT assets and services at an affordable pay per use pricing model which will help such companies reduce their ‘sunk costs’ into large IT assets that will obsolete soon.

Levels of virtualization

While a single computer can be easily virtualized, software such as VMware also allows creation of a robust virtualization platform that can scale across several interconnected computers and storage devices to form a virtualized infrastructure. Virtualization helps create pools of dynamic resources

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What’s your Social Intelligence Quotient?

The reason why star performers often fail when given senior organizational roles has baffled management thinkers for a long time. Only recently, findings based on serious research, have come up with the all-important differentiator – Social Intelligence.

A recent study of CEOs, both successful and not so successful, by Egon Zehnder International, a Zurich-based executive search consulting firm, found that failed CEOs were hired for their IQ and business expertise, and were fired for poor emotional quotient and social skills.

But didn’t Management training make us believe that high performance is a function of IQ, knowledge, hard work and competence? Daniel Coleman, ‘Father’ of EQ, has been studying the link between performance and social skills, and his research indicates that leaders with high Social Intelligence (SI) lead organizations to high revenue growth. Convinced of its significance and having treated SI as a small component of EQ earlier, Coleman now insists on studying, understanding and learning SI explicitly.

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The Tiger Way

With hardly any statesmen around and politicians’ credibility at an all-time low, authors are turning to living sports legends for inspiration. The good news is there are a good number of them around to share their life lessons today. For men and women in business, asked to perform at their peak all the time, three contemporary sportsmen stand out – Tiger Woods, Roger Federer and Lance Armstrong.

Brad Kearns’s recent book ‘How Tiger Does it: Put the Success Formula of a Champion into Everything You do’ (Tata McGraw-Hill Publishing, 2008), may well be one of the most inspirational books going around today. This is a sequel to his earlier book on the legendry cyclist Lance Armstrong, called How Lance Does It: Put the Success Formula of a Champion Into Everything You Do. It appears Brad, 41, is specializing in writing inspirational books on sports personalities. Why not? He is an accomplished sports person himself, and the rare combination of being an elite athlete, writer and coach gives him a powerful platform to inspire people to achieve peak performance.

How Tiger Does It offers the secrets to living life to the fullest—the Tiger way. Using intimate interviews with Tiger’s contemporaries and examples from his professional and personal life, Brad analyzes the mental drive behind the 33 year old’s success to reveal the heart and mind of a great champion.

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