“The most unfair practice is the equal treatment of unequals.”

Ken Blanchard

Author, “The One Minute Manager”

Are You a Leader, or just an Excellent Sheep?

This article in Forbes,   “The Key Missing Ingredient in Leadership Today”  takes a hard look at leadership through a lecture that was originally given at West Point.  The author, in a subsequent essay entitled “Solitude and Leadership”  wonders if “…for too long we have been training leaders who only know how to keep the routine going. Who can answer questions, but don’t know how to ask them. Who can fulfill goals, but don’t know how to set them. Who think about how to get things done, but not whether they’re worth doing in the first place  “What we don’t have, in other words, are thinkers. People who can think for themselves. People who can formulate a new direction: for the country, for a corporation or a college, for the Army—a new way of doing things, a new way of looking at things. People, in other words, with vision.”

In other words, are you, or your people, simply very good at dealing with the bureaucracy (or as the author puts it,  being an “excellent sheep”)  or are you capable of moving beyond it…in other words actually leading?

Econ Recon:

Onward and Upward:   Once again, Vistage Staff Economist Alan Beaulieu brings much needed clarity to the interpretation of economic data.  In his most recent brief blog, Onward and Upward,  he looks at the negativity of the media reports and suggests that they may not be properly interpreting the metrics they are monitoring.  He sees continued growth in the near term.  Check it out.

A Lesson for Ben Bernanke:   Economist Brian Wesbury looks at the Fed’s behavior and suggests that Dr. Bernanke could take a lesson from another leader in a different branch of the government.  Check out this six minute video on the Fed and the overall economy.

Three Interview Questions that Reveal Everything

A Vistage speaker on hiring once remarked that “We hire people for what they know and fire them for who they are.”  Finding out who someone really is before hiring can be hard, but here are three interview questions that reveal everything.   Are you asking them?