Leadership & Organisations

It’s not all about business plans and spreadsheets and getting to the next goal. The picture of real success is at least partly in your mind.

Stop talking, start listening. Can tweaking your approach help clinch the deal? Picture the scene: it’s late in your fiscal year and you’re in the final stages of negotiating a big sale. If you land this one, you will exceed your annual sales target by 25 percent and your bonus will double. No doubt about it – you want this one.

“A general who fears to unsheathe his sword is not a good general,” says Mr. Li Jiaxiang, Chairman of Air China from 2004 to 2008 and the #1 performing corporate leader in China according to our new ranking (just published in the Harvard Business Review China and the centerpiece for the magazine’s launch events in Beijing and Shanghai).

Creative inspiration comes from the most unexpected places. Sometimes where you expect it the least. This was my experience at a high school graduation that I recently attended. The programme had all the usual format of these symbolic events: a warm glow, certificates, the band, photos, the Principal’s speech and an unknown guess speaker.

Pop quiz: How do you define an entrepreneur? The typical answer—which is technically correct—is that an entrepreneur is anyone who starts a business. That includes folks who start lawn care businesses, dry cleaners, and yogurt shops.

Reading the news these past several months on the Euro crisis may have you believe that the difficulties are the result of leaders navigating in completely unchartered territory. The EU experiment is a great challenge because it is so remarkably unique. This isn’t really true, or at least the part about not having examples to help charter the territory. In fact there are many relevant analogies from business organizations.

If “the quickest way to make a millionaire out of billionaire is to buy an airline,” as Sir Richard Branson once remarked, then what does that mean for billionaires who build commercial space airlines? Ask Branson or Jeff Bezos, because they are the crazy ones: They not only dream; they dream big.

A new McKinsey study (PDF) reports statistically what we already knew from personal experience: that mid-career and senior women tend to be found disproportionally in staff jobs, or “pink ghettos,” relative to men.

If you’re wondering what to do next in your career, you’re hardly alone. The debate about where and how we may best feed our hunger for mastery, service, prestige, approval, safety, achievement — whatever we’re after — is fiercer than ever.