The reading this week in Organizational Dynamics focused on interpersonal dynamics and leadership. I find the text laborious and meandering as he attempts to distill the lessons of leadership from his professional experience and draw conclusions from past consulting projects. I am increasingly inclined to agree with Dilbert, that the only thing most leaders have in common is that they haven’t read all the books on leadership and that all the books on leadership are different. Going one step further, even if similar characteristics, environmental, personal or otherwise, could be found, there’s still the question of whether it’s a causal relationship. In other words, if I emulate all the qualities that are common among great leaders, will I be a great leader? Leadership Failures Among notable cases of leadership failures in recent news is the poor handling of sexual misconduct reports in the military. This affects the entire military culture, including a recently published article about poor handling of a sexual misconduct case at West Point. Each officer involved in the case wanted a different outcome, and almost none of them demonstrated objectivity and a willingness to use common sense. Another case that increasingly shows poor leadership is the state of China’s environment. China’s continued pursuit of economic gain at the expense of environmental responsibility is translating into real social problems for its people and its government. Domestically, we see cases every day, in congress, in the white house, in our communities and major corporations of leaders failing to accomplish the aims which they were chosen to solve. They’re falling short in execution, but that’s not the biggest gap. Vision Among all the virtues attributed to great leaders, vision is often overlooked. Even when vision is mentioned, it’s typically in the sense of having a mission statement or a long range goal. The type of vision that changes the world is singular, focused, passionate and probably psychotic. In order to drive people to question and even abandon their individual mission statements in favor of yours, you have to present a gap in reality wide enough that they question their own perception of reality. Passion and conviction need to be at a fever pitch in order to displace disbelief. True vision acknowledges that...

In Reframing Organizations by Bolman and Deal, they present four frames through which a business can be viewed. One of those is the Human Resources frame, and its focus is primarily on the human needs of workers and how those needs impact the workplace. They propose two opposing viewpoints with respect to human resources, one arguing that workers are expendable resources and have a right to nothing more than a paycheck. The other viewpoint is that the human needs of workers must factor prominently into the decisions of the business. This includes a sense of meaning and purpose, comfort and well being. National Labor Relations Board The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) was established in 1933 to serve as a mediator between labor and business. Its focus was on enforcing the laws that enabled workers to unionize. Its charter was later expanded to include corporate aspects such as protecting employers against strikes when those strikes were not in the best interest of all parties. As might be expected, there are strong political divisions, roughly along party lines, with respect to the role of the NLRB and the scope of its authority. During the highly partisan years of President Obama’s first term and carrying in to his second, NLRB appointments have been a hot issue on capital hill. President Obama attempted to circumvent the standard process of senate approval of nominees, but this was later ruled unconstitutional. In recent weeks, the topic has come up again as a bargaining chip in senate negotiations related to the handling of filibusters. Social Impact With so much partisan posturing, it’s easy to lose sight of the social impact of these appointments and the NLRB. On the one hand, there’s a direct impact on the lives of the workers that belong to unions. With a weak economy, there are also real risks to fiscal well being if aggressive union policy makes it difficult for American businesses to function. The landscape of American employment is much different today than it was in 1933 when the NLRB was initially formed. Many businesses today are intensely focused on the needs and wants of employees in a market that increasingly requires highly skilled thought workers. With socialized retirement, increasingly...

A major buzzword in business today is Agile. More and more managers and CEOs want to embrace the fast moving, quick to adapt model that has fueled some of the most prolific growth in the companies of our day. Some examples of agile companies include Amazon, Google and a growing number of tech statups.  Amazon releases changes to their website for customers to use every 11.6 seconds. Google is now able to add changes to it’s live search index in a matter of hours for billions of sites around the world. Nimble startups can create a ready-to-sell product in a weekend with very little overhead. Time to Market With examples of very large companies able to move so quickly, it may be a surprise to some that Microsoft still releases a new version of its flagship product, the Windows operating system, every couple of years. One explanation may be that an operating system is more complicated than Amazon’s shopping system, but then Microsoft Window’s biggest competitor, Linux, releases several times a year: Starting in 2004, the release process changed and new kernels started coming out on a regular schedule every 2–3 months… Microsoft’s CEO, Steve Ballmer, has restructured the company several times during his 13 years at the companies head. Recently he announced yet another restructuring Microsoft. Previous restructurings at Microsoft had the aim of moving the company in a more agile direction. This was accomplished by granting autonomy to individual product groups. This restructuring appears to be going the opposite direction. The company said it will shift from largely autonomous product groups to a more horizontal structure While some of the rhetoric from Microsoft about this restructuring claims to improve their overall performance as a company, some analysts are wondering how that will be, since the proposed horizontal structure will require more discussion and meetings. Control vs. Agility Michael Gerber describes a business triad in which all business roles fall into one of three main heads: Entrepreneur, Manager and Technician. In the case of the more agile companies I cited above, there is a strong vision. The entrepreneurial clarity is communicated effectively to all employees. Managers and technicians alike understand the vision as its being passed down. Autonomous groups...

There has been a lot of press surrounding the release of Windows 8. Good and bad press are expected when a new product, especially one that deviates significantly from an established norm, is released to market. In the case of Windows 8, the amount of negative press may have taken Microsoft a bit by surprise. In May, the Wall Street Journal published an article highlighting the disconnect between Microsoft’s vision of computing and users expectations. Two notable disconnects include the developing gap in computing use cases and what appears to be a design by committee failure. Culture of Computing The culture of computing has evolved rapidly over the last three decades. This evolution had been spurred by both computing power and the cost for that computing power. As computing power increased, so did the quality of the graphics, audio and a broad range of uses that weren’t possible before. These include processing large amounts of data in applications such as spreadsheets and databases. The cost of that computing power has also come down significantly, which has created a consumer market where there was previously a majority business market. As high end computing made it into the hands of the consumer, the typical business use cases were replaced with entertainment and hobby use cases. Rather than spreadsheets, consumers wanted to listen to music and watch video. The ends to which that computing power was applied began to change significantly. The growing interconnectedness of the Internet meant that much of the computing power previously required on a personal computer was being moved onto servers, which allowed consumers to do more of what they wanted with less computing power and less specific computing know how. During much of this evolution, Microsoft’s focus on the desktop operating system maintained its focus on original business use cases and did very little with the emerging consumer use cases. Meanwhile, visionaries like Steve Jobs saw that most consumer use cases could be accommodated with very little computing power and a smaller screen. Along came the iPhone and iPad. A major shortcoming related to Microsoft’s design of Windows 8 is that it failed to recognize that the smartphone and tablet computing market serve a different set of...

The MBA program director and many of the professors  at NNU prefer papers to be submitted in APA style, 6th edition format. There are many tutorials and guides about how to follow the APA style. I perfer to use LaTeX. TeX and LaTeX are typesetting systems that allow the author to focus on content in plain text and leave the formatting alone. When the content is complete, simply use LaTeX to compile or render your document. I typically use pdfLaTeX and render straight to PDF for delivery or printing. There are other formats, including DVI, that can also be used. Getting LaTeX One disadvantage to LaTeX is the high learning curve. Another is complexity in installing new styles. Compared to Word, it can take quite a bit of setup to get it going. However, once it’s going, changes are easy to make and the entire document can be recompiled. References, figures, and any other dynamic elements simply update themselves in the new view. TeX live I suggest starting with TeX live. I download the .ISO file and use slysoft virtual clone drive to mount it. At that point I have what looks like a drive on my system and can install TeX live. Getting APA6 Next, I download the apa6 package from CTAN. unzip these files into a temporary directory. I opened up a console window (click start and type ‘cmd’) and changed into the directory where I had just unzipped the package. Once there I created two directories: config pseudoTeX I then ran the command “latex apa6.dtx”. That created a bunch of files, include the .CLS file. Install I then created a local directory for this new class definition here C:\texlive\texmf-local\tex\latex\local\apa6 I copied most of the files into this local directory, including the config folder, that were compiled above when I ran ‘latex’ on the ‘apa6.dtx’ file. I then ran ‘texhash.exe’ to update the tex database with information about the new apa6 class. LaTeX editor On Windows I use the WinShell editor for LaTeX. It includes some shortcuts and other helpers, including one click compile and view in acrobat. This is not a WYSIWYG editor, but it does provide helpers for much of what you want to do....