Positive Leadership: The Nature of Leadership

As the CEO and vice chairman of HCL Technologies, Vineet Nayar embarked on a journey to re-imagine and reinvent the nature of power, leadership, and value creation inside a vast organisation. 

Driven by the belief that the traditional management model—built to serve control-obsessed managers rather than to support customer-obsessed employees—was broken, Vineet launched a series of experiments in promoting transparency, opening up the realm of strategy to all employees, and reversing accountability so managers served frontline employees. 

During his tenure, HCLT grew from 30,000 to 85,000 employees and from $750 million to $6.3 billion in revenues. In this keynote from the inaugural MIX Mashup, Vineet unpacks his adventures in inverting the pyramid and distributing the work of leadership. It’s a master class in reinventing a large, traditional organisation and a short course in how to launch a management experiment.

 

Positive Leadership: The Nature of Leadership

Positive Leadership: Why Good Leaders Make You Feel Safe

Positive Leadership: Why Good Leaders Make You Feel Safe

Positive Leadership: More is Less

Greg McKeown saw first-hand how success can lead straight to professional and personal failure, during his career evaluating and coaching Silicon Valley executives. 

The heart of the problem, he says, is the insidious idea that we can do it all. As entrepreneurs and executives find success, they're often overwhelmed by expectations and options, and end up losing the single-minded focus that made them successful in the first place. 

Taking inspiration from legendary designer Dieter Ram's philosophy of "less but better", McKeown outlines an antidote in his book Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, which features practical tips on how to figure out what's most important, eliminate the trivial, and establish routines for effortless execution.

Positive Leadership: More is Less

Positive Leadership: Scaling Up Excellence

Stanford Professor Bob Sutton shares principles and colorful examples from his most recent book, Scaling Up Excellence, co-authored by Huggy Rao. 

Touching on concepts around emotion, complexity, and connecting people, Sutton explains why scaling is about spreading and sustaining a mindset, not just a footprint.

Positive Leadership: Scaling Up Excellence

Positive Leadership: The Science of Character

Positive Leadership: The Science of Character

Positive Leadership: Essential Aspects of Leadership

General (Ret.) Stanley McChrystal speaks to Stanford Graduate School of Business students about essential aspects of leadership such as trust, purpose, and adaptability. 

"Talent alone doesn't make a great team. You need faith in your colleagues and alignment behind a common goal," shared McChrystal. 

Positive Leadership: Essential Aspects of Leadership

Positive Leadership: Wholeheartedness

Brené Brown is a research professor at the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work. She has spent the past ten years studying vulnerability, courage, authenticity, and shame. She spent the first five years of her decade-long study focusing on shame and empathy, and is now using that work to explore a concept that she calls Wholeheartedness. She poses the questions:

How do we learn to embrace our vulnerabilities and imperfections so that we can engage in our lives from a place of authenticity and worthiness? How do we cultivate the courage, compassion, and connection that we need to recognise that we are enough – that we are worthy of love, belonging, and joy?

Positive Leadership: Wholeheartedness

Positive Leadership: A Study on Praise and Mindsets

Positive Leadership: A Study on Praise and Mindsets

Positive Leadership: You Can't Lead Alone

Barry Posner is the Accolti Endowed Professor of Leadership at the Leavey School of Business, Santa Clara University. 

In this talk he discusses two truths from his book with co-author Jim Kouzes, "The Truth About Leadership;" you make a difference and you can't do it alone. 

Positive Leadership: You Can't Lead Alone

Positive Leadership: The Future of Leadership

Sharing their secrets of leadership success: Former U.S. Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson; Captain Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger; Robert Kraft, New England Patriots owner; James Owens, Caterpillar chairman; Wesley Clark, retired U.S. Army general and Alison Levine USMA West Point adjunct professor.

Positive Leadership: The Future of Leadership

Positive Leadership: Confidence and Courage are Overrated

Brené Brown is a research professor at the University of Houston Graduate College of Social Work. 

She has spent the past ten years studying vulnerability, courage, authenticity, and shame. She spent the first five years of her decade-long study focusing on shame and empathy, and is now using that work to explore a concept that she calls Wholeheartedness. 

She poses the questions:

How do we learn to embrace our vulnerabilities and imperfections so that we can engage in our lives from a place of authenticity and worthiness? 

How do we cultivate the courage, compassion, and connection that we need to recognise that we are enough – that we are worthy of love, belonging, and joy?

Positive Leadership: Confidence and Courage are Overrated

Positive Leadership: Scaling Up Excellence

In Scaling Up Excellence, Stanford faculty Robert Sutton and Hayagreeva "Huggy" Rao tackle a challenge that determines every organisation's success: scaling up farther, faster, and more effectively as a programme or an organisation creates a larger footprint. 

Sutton and Rao have devoted much of the last decade to uncovering what it takes to build and uncover pockets of exemplary performance, to help spread them, and to keep recharging organisations with ever better work practices. 

Drawing on inside accounts and case studies and academic research from a wealth of industries -- including start-ups, pharmaceuticals, airlines, retail, financial services, high-tech, education, non-profits, government, and healthcare -- Sutton and Rao identify the key scaling challenges that confront every organisation.

They reveal how the best leaders and teams develop, spread, and instil the right mindsets in their people -- rather than ruining or watering down the very things that have fuelled successful growth in the past. They unpack the principles that help to cascade excellence throughout an organisation, as well as show how to eliminate destructive beliefs and behaviours that will hold them back.

Robert Sutton is professor of management science and engineering in the Stanford Engineering School. His previous books include Good Boss, Bad Boss: How to be the Best...and Learn from the Worst, and The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilised Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't. Huggy Rao is professor of organisational behaviour at Stanford Graduate School of Business, and the author of Market Rebels: How Activists Make or Break Radical Innovations.

Positive Leadership: Scaling Up Excellence

Positive Leadership: Motivate Yourself By Visualising Your Goals

Motivation expert Jon Gordon visits TODAY to offer some tips on motivating yourself to organize yourself, stay connected to friends and family, and achieve a healthier life.




 

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Positive Leadership: Motivate Yourself By Visualising Your Goals

Positive Leadership: Teaching Young People to be Entrepreneurs

An entrepreneur since childhood, Cameron Herold wants parents and teachers to recognise -- and foster -- entrepreneurial talent in kids.

For 20 years, Cameron Herold has been coaching entrepreneurs on five continents, helping them build their companies. He started BackPocket COO to coach and mentor young, fun companies -- and help them make their dreams happen. Herold was a leading force behind one of the most successful new business ventures of the last decade, 1-800-GOT-JUNK?. He was Chief Operating Officer for nearly seven years. Prior to that, he was VP of Corporate Development at Ubarter.com.

Positive Leadership: Teaching Young People to be Entrepreneurs