Writing
Distributed Leadership for Sustained Innovation
How do you loosen the reins and empower people to make autonomous decisions that are aligned with strategy? How do you retain the speed and flexibility of a startup culture as you grow and scale? Read here about how distributed leadership organizations rely on customer-focused entrepreneurial teams that align with top-level strategy and coordinate with others up, down, and across the organization.
Nimble Leadership: Walking the line between creativity and chaos — Harvard Business Review, 2019 *Our interview based on this article was selected for HBR at 100: The Most Influential and Innovative Articles from Harvard Business Review's First Century
Why distributed leadership is the future of management — Sloan Ideas Made to Matter, 2022
3 Ways to Build a Culture of Collaborative Innovation, Harvard Business Review, 2019
How to Give Your Team the Right Amount of Autonomy, Harvard Business Review, 2019
The True Heroes of Covid-19 and How They're Filling the Void at the Top, The Hill, 2020
Coming soon: Take the Distributed Leadership Audit for your organization
Future-Ready Local Innovation & Resilience
Visionary business leaders are not only driving their own companies forward into the future; they are also designing their region's future-ready strategy for economic innovation, inclusive talent development, & local resilience. Read here about how they do it.
How Business Coalitions Can Have a Strong Local Impact — Harvard Business Review, 2022
How Corporate Clout Helps Communities Thrive — Sloan Management Review, 2021
How AEP Is Powering An Appalachian Community To Thrive — Chief Executive, 2021
Why CEOs are Pushing for Community Prosperity — Chief Executive, 2017
Get involved: Share your company's future-ready initiative for regional innovation & resilience at the BILT-Library website
Getting Goals Right for Distributed Leadership
Goal setting is one of the highest leverage leadership moves. But it's all too common to get goals wrong—setting them too big and broad, or too small and too slow. Here are tips to getting goals right, and communicating them to so that your people can take aligned action.
Set Ambitious but Realistic Environmental Goals — Sloan Management Review, 2023
4 Ways CEOs Can Conquer Short-Termism —Harvard Business Review, 2017
Integrated Reporting, Stakeholder Engagement, and Balanced Investing at American Electric Power — Journal of Applied Corporate Finance, 2012
Multi-Stakeholder Collaboration for Systems Change
Complex social, technological, and environmental problems and opportunities cannot be solved by any one organization, industry, or sector alone. But collaboration should come with a warning label. It's hard, time-intensive, and it often fails. People speak different languages and value different outcomes. Read more here about research-backed principles for avoiding pitfalls and getting stakeholder partnerships right.
Six Leadership Practices for Wicked Problem Solving — Forbes, 2016
Rebounding from COVID-19: How whole-person health care can guide the way — The Hill, 2020
Dynamic Strategies for Successful Health Collaboratives — Stanford Social Innovation Review, 2022
Dialogic Approaches to Global Challenges: Moving from “Dialogue Fatigue” to Dialogic Change Processes — White Paper, 2005
Dialogue Across Divides
In today's polarized social and political environment it's hard to have productive conversations with others who hold different opinions and beliefs. Too often we avoid talking or we end up in a fight. Here are some tips and tools for bridging the divide, and even finding common ground.
This 4-step listening challenge can help reduce polarized discourse — MIT Sloan Ideas Made to Matter, 2022
Red Fathers and Blue Daughters Bridging the Political Divide — Medium, 2022
There’s reason for people on opposing sides of abortion to talk, even if they disagree – it helps build respect, understanding and can lead to policy change — The Conversation, 2022
Get involved: Take the Listening Challenge with a friend or family member
Intuitive Leadership
We prize vision, analysis, and rationality in the Western approach to leadership. But this is only half the story. We all use our intuitive, subconscious, emotional, and sensory capacities to gather information and make sense of the world. "You should inform your gut, and then trust it," said the late Nobel laureate Danny Kahneman. My current research explores how top leaders and innovators use their intuitive and other "non-rational" sensory capacities, in combination with their logical and analytical capabilities, to make good decisions and lead with confidence and conviction.
Research and book in progress, 2024.
