“There’s a lot of activity around Adaptive Path these days. With the impending release of our book Subject to Change, our upcoming events rapidly selling out, our growing presence in Austin, and our expanding range of interesting projects for clients around the world — there’s more going on here than ever.

Right now, all three of us (Peter, Jesse, and Bryan) work as a team to keep Adaptive Path growing culturally, creatively, and financially. But with all the opportunities opening up for the company, we’ve decided the time is right to add a new perspective to the mix. That’s why we’re announcing today that we’re on the lookout for a CEO to add to our executive team.”

“It’s a pickle of a paradox: As our knowledge and expertise increase, our creativity and ability to innovate tend to taper off. Why? Because the walls of the proverbial box in which we think are thickening along with our experience.”

“In today’s working world there are millions of employees in identical cubical ‘farms’ who feel frustrated by their company’s hierarchies. The way they’re micromanaged–or not managed at all–leaves them feeling powerless.

If you remember nothing else from this blog remember this: leadership has nothing to do with formal authority, it has everything to do with influence.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that you will be your boss’s boss, but it does mean that you can lead your boss. How? Simple.”

“Bringing together leaders in visual thinking for the first time in one location, the VizThink ‘08 Conference (http://www.vizthink.com) is an opportunity for executives to understand ways of incorporating visualization processes into business, learning and communications strategies to gain faster and more effective results. Hosted by Portland, Ore. based VizThink LLC, the conference will include breakout sessions and forums facilitated by some of the most recognized names in the visual thinking space, including the distinguished Bob Horn from Stanford University, renowned author and artist Scott McCloud, award winning designer Nancy Duarte of Duarte Design, most notably known for her work in Al Gore’s Inconvenient Truth, and Nigel Holmes formerly with Time magazine. The conference will be held at the Westin San Francisco Market Street Hotel from January 27-29. Registration (http://www.vizthink.com/reg.html) is open now.”

“You don’t have to be in a position of authority to be a leader. Conversely, just because you have authority doesn’t mean that people will follow you. You must be a leader to get others to follow you.

There are many books on leadership. They can have lots of great examples and in-depth explanations, but sometimes you just need something simple to help you focus on the essentials. This article intends to do just that. These are the habits that will help you and your team achieve great things if you focus on them.”

“You don’t have to be in a position of authority to be a leader. Conversely, just because you have authority doesn’t mean that people will follow you. You must be a leader to get others to follow you.

There are many books on leadership. They can have lots of great examples and in-depth explanations, but sometimes you just need something simple to help you focus on the essentials. This article intends to do just that. These are the habits that will help you and your team achieve great things if you focus on them.”

“I’ve got this theory about what it’s like to be a manager and what it’s like to be a developer and which role suits a particular individual best, and I think it explains pretty well why I deeply, profoundly hate the former and dearly, truly love the latter.”

” The most basic aspects of leadership and change are a function of human nature. I’ve found there are specific steps in the process of how people make significant changes. The steps tend to be universal, independent of the content of change. They apply to process reengineering, the need for more innovation, new business strategies, you name it.

The eight steps are to create a sense of urgency, put the right team together, create a sensible change vision and strategy, communicate the plan to obtain buy-in, empower people to act, garner some short-term wins, then pound away the changes you are trying to make until you implement them and can make them stick. That basic process is at the heart of leading change.”

“If we’re going to make any headway in figuring out the new rules of leadership, we might as well say it up front: There is no one-size-fits-all approach to leadership. Leadership mantra #1: It all depends. Years ago, Yale professor of organization and management and professor of psychology Victor Vroom developed a model that was later adapted and popularized by Ken Blanchard. Their point: We need to think about situational leadership — the right person, the right style, for the right situation.”

“In 1970, The average CEO earned 28 times more than the average worker. Despite all the recent noise around reining in runaway CEO pay, the gap has widened drastically.”

“Why do most managers fail to spend enough time attending to the basics of managing people? When I ask them why, they almost always give me some variant of the same reasons—I call them the top seven management myths in today’s workplace.”

“Would it come as a shock to you to find out that the most highly paid corporate people do not know the costs of doing business inside and outside their organization? An online survey conducted by Strativity Group, Inc., a consulting company based in Parsippany, NJ, reports that over 300 executives:

81% do not know the cost of a customer complaint
75% do not know the cost of acquiring a new customer
60% claim they do not deserve their customers’ loyalty
51% claim their company does not deliver unique and beneficial products or services
50% do not know their organization’s annual customer retention rates…”

“Career advice from BNET: Hiring is one of the hardest parts of managing a team. A lot is riding on the initial meeting, and if you’re nervous or ill-prepared — or both — it can make you do strange things. The following mistakes are all too common, but they’re easy to avoid with some advance preparation.”

“You’re the boss. But it’s no fun (and very difficult) being a boss that is not respected, or is even actively disliked. How do you get your staff to be the best thing that ever happened to you? By being the best boss that ever happened to them.”

“Management and Leadership are not interchangeable words for me. We need both of them, for in part, management tends to be more internally focused (within a company, within an industry, within a person) whereas leadership is more externally focused on the future-forward actions you will take in the greater context of industry, community, or society. They have commonality to be sure, for instance, both are about capitalizing on human capacity, however they are defined by the differences we value in them: Management tends to be about systems and processes, whereas Leadership is more about ideas and experiments.

I believe there is both art and discipline in each, and I think of these rules as the discipline which helps reveal the great capacity of the art. Thus last time, twelve suggestions to help you self-manage, with a more disciplined you newly able to reveal your art. Now, twelve to help you self-lead, so a more disciplined you is newly able to reveal the art in others, those who choose you to lead them.”