Enterprise Leadership Quotes

A vision without execution is an hallucination.

A leader must lead. Where others see obstacles, he must see opportunities. When others see problems, he must see possibilities ... Civilization is not built on a negation but on an affirmation- an affirmation of the bright and promising possibilities that the future holds for those who are enterprising enough to pursue them.

With the support of a flesh-and-blood weapon named Major, a wondrous Belgian Mal named Keto, and a retired Judge named Shandy, Pack ripped apart the scandalous enterprise. That episode had culminated in the modern equivalent of the Gunfight at the OK Corral.

Don’t strive to be a well-rounded leader. Instead, discover your zone and stay there. Then delegate everything else. Admitting a weakness is a sign of strength. Acknowledging weakness doesn’t make a leader less effective. Everybody in your organization benefits when you delegate responsibilities that fall outside your core competency. Thoughtful delegation will allow someone else in your organization to shine. Your weakness is someone’s opportunity. Leadership is not always about getting things done “right.” Leadership is about getting things done through other people. The people who follow us are exactly where we have led them. If there is no one to whom we can delegate, it is our own fault. As a leader, gifted by God to do a few things well, it is not right for you to attempt to do everything. Upgrade your performance by playing to your strengths and delegating your weaknesses. There are many things I can do, but I have to narrow it down to the one thing I must do. The secret of concentration is elimination. Devoting a little of yourself to everything means committing a great deal of yourself to nothing. My competence in these areas defines my success as a pastor. A sixty-hour workweek will not compensate for a poorly delivered sermon. People don’t show up on Sunday morning because I am a good pastor (leader, shepherd, counselor). In my world, it is my communication skills that make the difference. So that is where I focus my time. To develop a competent team, help the leaders in your organization discover their leadership competencies and delegate accordingly. Once you step outside your zone, don’t attempt to lead. Follow. The less you do, the more you will accomplish. Only those leaders who act boldly in times of crisis and change are willingly followed. Accepting the status quo is the equivalent of accepting a death sentence. Where there’s no progress, there’s no growth. If there’s no growth, there’s no life. Environments void of change are eventually void of life. So leaders find themselves in the precarious and often career-jeopardizing position of being the one to draw attention to the need for change. Consequently, courage is a nonnegotiable quality for the next generation leader. The leader is the one who has the courage to act on what he sees. A leader is someone who has the courage to say publicly what everybody else is whispering privately. It is not his insight that sets the leader apart from the crowd. It is his courage to act on what he sees, to speak up when everyone else is silent. Next generation leaders are those who would rather challenge what needs to change and pay the price than remain silent and die on the inside. The first person to step out in a new direction is viewed as the leader. And being the first to step out requires courage. In this way, courage establishes leadership. Leadership requires the courage to walk in the dark. The darkness is the uncertainty that always accompanies change. The mystery of whether or not a new enterprise will pan out. The reservation everyone initially feels when a new idea is introduced. The risk of being wrong. Many who lack the courage to forge ahead alone yearn for someone to take the first step, to go first, to show the way. It could be argued that the dark provides the optimal context for leadership. After all, if the pathway to the future were well lit, it would be crowded. Fear has kept many would-be leaders on the sidelines, while good opportunities paraded by. They didn’t lack insight. They lacked courage. Leaders are not always the first to see the need for change, but they are the first to act. Leadership is about moving boldly into the future in spite of uncertainty and risk. You can’t lead without taking risk. You won’t take risk without courage. Courage is essential to leadership.

Engage the whole community with a common purpose to build an innovative and sustainable enterprise.

The key to the future for blacks is a commitment to America and its ideals of freedom, personal responsibility, the free enterprise system, and moral principles.

For getting success in business with Data Science, predictions must be backed by timely strategic actions.

History has proved incontrovertibly that success in great enterprises requires the presence of a leader of unshakeable capacity and power.

Predictions have an expiry date. Action is needed before predictions expire.

Realize that the guys who criticize will minimize the guys whose enterprise rises above the guys who criticize and minimize.

Enterprises are filled with technologists who are trying to bring their companies into the digital age and who are focused on achieving business value with technology. And they’re frustrated trying to do so.

The ideals of free enterprise and global leadership, central to American conservatism, are responsible for the greatest reduction in human misery since mankind began its long climb from the swamp to the stars.

The best leaders in any enterprise see problems coming and stack the deck to prevent negative “what ifs” from happening. They also have contingency plans to take advantage of positive openings which occur in fleeting windows of time.

Managers’ responsibility is to ensure that people deliver the expected results, which are the company’s strategy. The company’s strategy, in turn, determines its competitive advantage. So, if a manager does a poor job of motivating employees’ productivity, the enterprise is a weak competitor.

If Captain Jean-Luc Picard asked you to serve him aboard the starship Enterprise, you'd likely be happy to. You would recognise him as a great leader and a good man, and so you wouldn't have any problem following his orders. This is basically the relationship God wants with us - not slaves, not pets, not possessions, we would be co-workers and friends.

It is sometimes assumed that Americans care only for material things, that they are bent only on that kind of success which can be cashed into dollars and cents. That is a very narrow and unintelligent opinion. We have been successful beyond others in great commercial and industrial enterprises because we have been a people of vision. Our prosperity has resulted not only by disregarding but by maintaining high ideals. Material resources do not, and cannot, stand alone; they are the product of spiritual resources. It is because America, as a nation, has held fast to the higher things of life, because it has had a faith in mankind which it has dared to put to the test of self-government, because it has believed greatly in honor and righteousness, that a great material prosperity has been added unto it.

Neoconservatives have written about “getting lucky” with a “Pearl Harbor event.” Michael Ledeen wrote for example in his 1999 book Machiavelli on Modern Leadership: “Of course, we can always get lucky. Stunning events from outside can providently awaken the enterprise from its growing torpor, and demonstrate the need for renewal, as the devastating Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 so effectively aroused the United States from its soothing dreams of permanent neutrality….” Then the 9/11 attack aroused war fever against Muslims and Arabs in the Middle East. This is precisely the reason that “false flags” are popular tools for those who see war as noble and heroic in their effort to promote an agenda that is never noble but always self-serving. And there’s nothing heroic about chickenhawks, of which there are many.

Imagine the following. Three groups of ten individuals are in a park at lunchtime with a rainstorm threatening. In the first group, someone says: “Get up and follow me.” When he starts walking and only a few others join in, he yells to those still seated: “Up, I said, and now!” In the second group, someone says: “We’re going to have to move. Here’s the plan. Each of us stands up and marches in the direction of the apple tree. Please stay at least two feet away from other group members and do not run. Do not leave any personal belongings on the ground here and be sure to stop at the base of the tree. When we are all there . . .” In the third group, someone tells the others: “It’s going to rain in a few minutes. Why don’t we go over there and sit under that huge apple tree. We’ll stay dry, and we can have fresh apples for lunch.” I am sometimes amazed at how many people try to transform organizations using methods that look like the first two scenarios: authoritarian decree and micromanagement. Both approaches have been applied widely in enterprises over the last century, but mostly for maintaining existing systems, not transforming those systems into something better. When the goal is behavior change, unless the boss is extremely powerful, authoritarian decree often works poorly even in simple situations, like the apple tree case. Increasingly, in complex organizations, this approach doesn’t work at all. Without the power of kings and queens behind it, authoritarianism is unlikely to break through all the forces of resistance. People will ignore you or pretend to cooperate while doing everything possible to undermine your efforts. Micromanagement tries to get around this problem by specifying what employees should do in detail and then monitoring compliance. This tactic can break through some of the barriers to change, but in an increasingly unacceptable amount of time. Because the creation and communication of detailed plans is deadly slow, the change produced this way tends to be highly incremental. Only the approach used in the third scenario above has the potential to break through all the forces that support the status quo and to encourage the kind of dramatic shifts found in successful transformations. (See figure 5–1.) This approach is based on vision—a central component of all great leadership.

The essence of Roosevelt’s leadership, I soon became convinced, lay in his enterprising use of the “bully pulpit,” a phrase he himself coined to describe the national platform the presidency provides to shape public sentiment and mobilize action. Early in Roosevelt’s tenure, Lyman Abbott, editor of The Outlook, joined a small group of friends in the president’s library to offer advice and criticism on a draft of his upcoming message to Congress. “He had just finished a paragraph of a distinctly ethical character,” Abbott recalled, “when he suddenly stopped, swung round in his swivel chair, and said, ‘I suppose my critics will call that preaching, but I have got such a bully pulpit.’ ” From this bully pulpit, Roosevelt would focus the charge of a national movement to apply an ethical framework, through government action, to the untrammeled growth of modern America. Roosevelt understood from the outset that this task hinged upon the need to develop powerfully reciprocal relationships with members of the national press. He called them by their first names, invited them to meals, took questions during his midday shave, welcomed their company at day’s end while he signed correspondence, and designated, for the first time, a special room for them in the West Wing. He brought them aboard his private railroad car during his regular swings around the country. At every village station, he reached the hearts of the gathered crowds with homespun language, aphorisms, and direct moral appeals. Accompanying reporters then extended the reach of Roosevelt’s words in national publications. Such extraordinary rapport with the press did not stem from calculation alone. Long before and after he was president, Roosevelt was an author and historian. From an early age, he read as he breathed. He knew and revered writers, and his relationship with journalists was authentically collegial. In a sense, he was one of them. While exploring Roosevelt’s relationship with the press, I was especially drawn to the remarkably rich connections he developed with a team of journalists—including Ida Tarbell, Ray Stannard Baker, Lincoln Steffens, and William Allen White—all working at McClure’s magazine, the most influential contemporary progressive publication. The restless enthusiasm and manic energy of their publisher and editor, S. S. McClure, infused the magazine with “a spark of genius,” even as he suffered from periodic nervous breakdowns. “The story is the thing,” Sam McClure responded when asked to account for the methodology behind his publication. He wanted his writers to begin their research without preconceived notions, to carry their readers through their own process of discovery. As they educated themselves about the social and economic inequities rampant in the wake of teeming industrialization, so they educated the entire country. Together, these investigative journalists, who would later appropriate Roosevelt’s derogatory term “muckraker” as “a badge of honor,” produced a series of exposés that uncovered the invisible web of corruption linking politics to business. McClure’s formula—giving his writers the time and resources they needed to produce extended, intensively researched articles—was soon adopted by rival magazines, creating what many considered a golden age of journalism. Collectively, this generation of gifted writers ushered in a new mode of investigative reporting that provided the necessary conditions to make a genuine bully pulpit of the American presidency. “It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the progressive mind was characteristically a journalistic mind,” the historian Richard Hofstadter observed, “and that its characteristic contribution was that of the socially responsible reporter-reformer.

The men who projected and are pushing on this enterprise, with an executive ability that would maintain and manoeuvre an army in a campaign, are not, however, consciously philanthropists, moved by the charitable purpose of giving employment to men, or finding satisfaction in making two blades of grass grow where one grew before. They enjoy no doubt the sense of power in bringing things to pass, the feeling of leadership and the consequence derived from its recognition; but they embark in this enterprise in order that they may have the position and the luxury that increased wealth will bring, the object being, in most cases, simply material advantages—sumptuous houses, furnished with all the luxuries which are the signs of wealth, including, of course, libraries and pictures and statuary and curiosities, the most showy equipages and troops of servants; the object being that their wives shall dress magnificently, glitter in diamonds and velvets, and never need to put their feet to the ground; that they may command the best stalls in the church, the best pews in the theatre, the choicest rooms in the inn, and—a consideration that Plato does not mention, because his world was not our world—that they may impress and reduce to obsequious deference the hotel clerk. This life—for this enterprise and its objects are types of a considerable portion of life—is not without its ideal, its hero, its highest expression, its consummate flower. It is expressed in a word which I use without any sense of its personality, as the French use the word Barnum—for our crude young nation has

me to be honest about his failings as well as his strengths. She is one of the smartest and most grounded people I have ever met. “There are parts of his life and personality that are extremely messy, and that’s the truth,” she told me early on. “You shouldn’t whitewash it. He’s good at spin, but he also has a remarkable story, and I’d like to see that it’s all told truthfully.” I leave it to the reader to assess whether I have succeeded in this mission. I’m sure there are players in this drama who will remember some of the events differently or think that I sometimes got trapped in Jobs’s distortion field. As happened when I wrote a book about Henry Kissinger, which in some ways was good preparation for this project, I found that people had such strong positive and negative emotions about Jobs that the Rashomon effect was often evident. But I’ve done the best I can to balance conflicting accounts fairly and be transparent about the sources I used. This is a book about the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing. You might even add a seventh, retail stores, which Jobs did not quite revolutionize but did reimagine. In addition, he opened the way for a new market for digital content based on apps rather than just websites. Along the way he produced not only transforming products but also, on his second try, a lasting company, endowed with his DNA, that is filled with creative designers and daredevil engineers who could carry forward his vision. In August 2011, right before he stepped down as CEO, the enterprise he started in his parents’ garage became the world’s most valuable company. This is also, I hope, a book about innovation. At a time when the United States is seeking ways to sustain its innovative edge, and when societies around the world are trying to build creative digital-age economies, Jobs stands as the ultimate icon of inventiveness, imagination, and sustained innovation. He knew that the best way to create value in the twenty-first century was to connect creativity with technology, so he built a company where leaps of the imagination were combined with remarkable feats of engineering. He and his colleagues at Apple were able to think differently: They developed not merely modest product advances based on focus groups, but whole new devices and services that consumers did not yet know they needed. He was not a model boss or human being, tidily packaged for emulation. Driven by demons, he could drive those around him to fury and despair. But his personality and passions and products were all interrelated, just as Apple’s hardware and software tended to be, as if part of an integrated system. His tale is thus both instructive and cautionary, filled with lessons about innovation, character, leadership, and values.

Fascism rested not upon the truth of its doctrine but upon the leader’s mystical union with the historic destiny of his people, a notion related to romanticist ideas of national historic flowering and of individual artistic or spiritual genius, though fascism otherwise denied romanticism’s exaltation of unfettered personal creativity. The fascist leader wanted to bring his people into a higher realm of politics that they would experience sensually: the warmth of belonging to a race now fully aware of its identity, historic destiny, and power; the excitement of participating in a vast collective enterprise; the gratification of submerging oneself in a wave of shared feelings, and of sacrificing one’s petty concerns for the group’s good; and the thrill of domination. Fascism’s deliberate replacement of reasoned debate with immediate sensual experience transformed politics, as the exiled German cultural critic Walter Benjamin was the first to point out, into aesthetics. And the ultimate fascist aesthetic experience, Benjamin warned in 1936, was war. Fascist leaders made no secret of having no program. Mussolini exulted in that absence. “The Fasci di Combattimento,” Mussolini wrote in the “Postulates of the Fascist Program” of May 1920, “. . . do not feel tied to any particular doctrinal form.” A few months before he became prime minister of Italy, he replied truculently to a critic who demanded to know what his program was: “The democrats of Il Mondo want to know our program? It is to break the bones of the democrats of Il Mondo. And the sooner the better.” “The fist,” asserted a Fascist militant in 1920, “is the synthesis of our theory.” Mussolini liked to declare that he himself was the definition of Fascism. The will and leadership of a Duce was what a modern people needed, not a doctrine. Only in 1932, after he had been in power for ten years, and when he wanted to “normalize” his regime, did Mussolini expound Fascist doctrine, in an article (partly ghostwritten by the philosopher Giovanni Gentile) for the new Enciclopedia italiana. Power came first, then doctrine. Hannah Arendt observed that Mussolini “was probably the first party leader who consciously rejected a formal program and replaced it with inspired leadership and action alone.” Hitler did present a program (the 25 Points of February 1920), but he pronounced it immutable while ignoring many of its provisions. Though its anniversaries were celebrated, it was less a guide to action than a signal that debate had ceased within the party. In his first public address as chancellor, Hitler ridiculed those who say “show us the details of your program. I have refused ever to step before this Volk and make cheap promises.” Several consequences flowed from fascism’s special relationship to doctrine. It was the unquestioning zeal of the faithful that counted, more than his or her reasoned assent. Programs were casually fluid. The relationship between intellectuals and a movement that despised thought was even more awkward than the notoriously prickly relationship of intellectual fellow travelers with communism. Many intellectuals associated with fascism’s early days dropped away or even went into opposition as successful fascist movements made the compromises necessary to gain allies and power, or, alternatively, revealed its brutal anti-intellectualism. We will meet some of these intellectual dropouts as we go along. Fascism’s radical instrumentalization of truth explains why fascists never bothered to write any casuistical literature when they changed their program, as they did often and without compunction. Stalin was forever writing to prove that his policies accorded somehow with the principles of Marx and Lenin; Hitler and Mussolini never bothered with any such theoretical justification. Das Blut or la razza would determine who was right.

It is important to bear in mind that the Republicans long ago abandoned the pretense of functioning as a normal parliamentary party. They have, as respected conservative political commentator Norman Ornstein of the right-wing American Enterprise Institute observed, become a “radical insurgency” that scarcely seeks to participate in normal congressional politics.6 Since the days of President Ronald Reagan, the party leadership has plunged so far into the pockets of the very rich and the corporate sector that they can attract votes only by mobilizing parts of the population that have not previously been an organized political force. Among them are extremist evangelical Christians, now probably a majority of Republican voters; remnants of the former slaveholding states; nativists who are terrified that “they” are taking our white, Christian, Anglo-Saxon country away from us; and others who turn the Republican primaries into spectacles remote from the mainstream of modern society—though not from the mainstream of the most powerful country in world history.

A data protection officer (DPO) is an enterprise security leadership role required by the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Data protection officers are responsible for overseeing data protection strategy and implementation to ensure compliance with GDPR requirements.

Remember that these are the same project executors that we chose to execute the project—presumably because we believed we could trust them to make good decisions. They were probably trained, or at least hired, by the enterprise to make sure they had the right skills. So when the project is off schedule, is it natural to first suspect those project executors?

Learning the business is a must for the CIO to come up with the experiential knowledge coupled with information for enabling and empowering the enterprise.

Theoretically, then, the motor of effective leadership consists in matching assistants' talents to tasks and in consistently expressing appreciation for their best efforts, thus encouraging them to be entrepreneurs contributing their talents to a shared enterprise. The major advantage of having a bevy of entrepreneurs working together is that each of them becomes committed to the success of the enterprise, and so not only applies all of his or her skills to the desired results, but also seeks to improve those skills by continuously learning on the job. Entrepreneurs will always outdo wage workers because entrepreneurs have their intelligence — their skill, their ability, their talent — engaged in the enterprise, while wage workers are merely punching the clock.

Can your leadership team identify your trade-offs? It is often easy to see trade-offs in other companies, but can you articulate your own? There are no optical drives in any Apple Airs or data ports in iPads. Has your enterprise similarly been able to say no to your equivalent of optical drives and data ports? Apple may lose some customers who want an integrated DVD player. They are okay with that. Starbucks may lose some customers on a tight budget who are in a big hurry. They are okay with that.

believe that this is simpler than it sounds. It is about identifying the obstacles in our way and taking today’s best-practice ideas—those found in the Agile Manifesto and in books like Lean Startup, Lean Software Development, Lean Enterprise, The DevOps Handbook, and others on today’s management bookshelves—and applying them to IT leadership.

I have discussed the challenge of defining business value in The Art of Business Value; even more challenging in this case is defining what we mean by business value delivered by IT. Business value is delivered by the enterprise with support from IT—IT is part of a whole, a complex system in which its ability to deliver value depends on factors outside of IT. The only way that IT can deliver business value itself is through cost-cutting within the IT cost structure—in all other cases that I can think of, IT is delivering product that might or might not then be used by someone else to deliver business value.

In our highly disjointed world at VeraComm, where functions don’t communicate well and don’t significantly collaborate, we fail to improve as a whole. Everybody seeks opportunities for improvement, but because we’re separated from each other, the best we can do is improve our individual step in the process and no more. We fail to understand that problems at one step can be caused by fundamental issues at another. And with learning cycles as slow as ours–pretty much equal to the frequency of releasing, every eight or ten months–we just can’t learn. Cause and effect are so widely separated from each other on the timeline that we simply cannot connect the dots. •

Leadership is the ability to figure out what you believe and then summon the courage to appropriately act on those beliefs. These actions must be geared to adding value to an enterprise and making a positive impact on others.

Jumping to conclusions without extensive reasoning, exploration, and discussion can have devastating consequences. It's also vitally important—yet very difficult—to maintain your intellectual honesty. Can you see things as they really are and fully appreciate what is happening? Human nature has a strong tendency to rationalize situations, to convince us that no significant changes are necessary. Reality can rattle us, making us nervous and uncomfortable. To cope with the stress, we talk ourselves into a less damning interpretation. This is why groupthink and confirmation bias are common and incredibly dangerous to the well‐being of the enterprise. It is the role of leadership to maintain a culture of brutal honesty.

14. Build a Diverse Top Team. Have you drawn quality performers into your inner circle? Are they diverse in expertise but united in purpose? Are they as engaged, energized, and included as you? 15. Place Common Interest First. Have you contributed to or even helped define the enterprise’s purpose? In all decisions, have you placed shared resolve ahead of private gain? Do the firm’s vision and strategy embody the organization’s mission? 16. Think Like a Chief Executive. Are you reasoning like a president or CEO even if you are unlikely to become one? If you were the company CEO, what would she or he expect of your leadership now? Have you pulled all your functions and operations under a common umbrella?

The first responsibilities that typically transfer are managerial and operational roles; the second are nonvoting shares (typically driven by estate planning prerogatives) and next comes control over the voting shares. Typically, it is the family leadership roles that are the last to be handed down.

High school seniors: 70 percent report that they have “above average” leadership skills, compared with 2 percent “below average”; in the ability to get along with others, 25 percent rate themselves in the top 1 percent, and 60 percent put themselves in the top 10 percent. • College professors: 94 percent rate themselves as doing above-average work. • Engineers: In two different companies, 32 percent and 42 percent rated themselves among the top 5 percent of performers. • Entrepreneurs: When 3,000 small-business owners rated the probability that different companies would succeed, on average they rated the prospects of their own businesses as 8.1 out of 10 but gave similar enterprises odds of only 5.9 out of 10.

But Anita Roddick had a different take on that. In 1976, before the words to say it had been found, she set out to create a business that was socially and environmentally regenerative by design. Opening The Body Shop in the British seaside town of Brighton, she sold natural plant-based cosmetics (never tested on animals) in refillable bottles and recycled boxes (why throw away when you can use again?) while paying a fair price to the communities worldwide that supplied cocoa butter, brazil nut oil and dried herbs. As production expanded, the business began to recycle its wastewater for using in its products and was an early investor in wind power. Meanwhile, company profits went to The Body Shop Foundation, which gave them to social and environmental causes. In all, a pretty generous enterprise. Roddick’s motivation? ‘I want to work for a company that contributes to and is part of the community,’ she later explained. ‘If I can’t do something for the public good, what the hell am I doing?’47 Such a values-driven mission is what the analyst Marjorie Kelly calls a company’s ‘living purpose’—turning on its head the neoliberal script that the business of business is simply business. Roddick proved that business can be far more than that, by embedding benevolent values and a regenerative intent at the company’s birth. ‘We dedicated the Articles of Association and Memoranda—which in England is the legal definition of the purpose of your company—to human rights advocacy and social and environmental change,’ she explained in 2005, ‘so everything the company did had that as its canopy.’48 Today’s most innovative enterprises are inspired by the same idea: that the business of business is to contribute to a thriving world. And the growing family of enterprise structures that are intentionally distributive by design—including cooperatives, not-for-profits, community interest companies, and benefit corporations—can be regenerative by design too.49 By explicitly making a regenerative commitment in their corporate by-laws and enshrining it in their governance, they can safeguard a ‘living purpose’ through times of leadership change and protect it from mission creep. Indeed the most profound act of corporate responsibility for any company today is to rewrite its corporate by-laws, or articles of association, in order to redefine itself with a living purpose, rooted in regenerative and distributive design, and then to live and work by it.

Dwight David Eisenhower never led a single soldier into battle. Before World War II, he had never even heard a shot fired in anger. His only “combat wound” was the bad knee, weakened by a West Point football injury, that he twisted helping push a jeep out of the Normandy mud. Yet it was Ike Eisenhower who, as supreme Allied commander in Europe, was responsible for leading the greatest military enterprise in history.

Organisations and teams can only be as amazing as the Human Beings that are part of them.

Leadership is a lonely business. You live 24/7 with uncertainty, anxiety, and the fear of personal failure. You make countless decisions, and being wrong about any of them might let down your employees and investors. The stakes, both financial and human, are high. And what adds to the terror is that there is no manual, no how‐to guide. Every problem has, at least to some extent, never been seen before. In particular, early‐stage enterprises often feel like they're shrouded in a fog of war.

One of the reasons as to why many leaders will fail to lead their enterprises to the digital future, is because they are looking for answers, instead of asking fundamental, thought provoking and searching questions. Answers are not what matters about digital transformation, it's the questions that do.

The flip side of the coin was the positive imagination of Ashkenazi immigrants as diligent and productive members of the middle class holding great value to the state-building enterprise. The fusion of ability, class, and ethnicity thus worked either way. American immigrants in particular were exempted from selection policies. Immigrants from Poland received privileged treatment when they were competing with Moroccans for scarce absorption resources in 1956. The state and the Jewish Agency leadership also deliberated on various occasions about how to actively promote Western immigration and/or “middle-class immigration,” especially after the liberal bourgeois General Zionists had participated in the government for the first time in December 1952, and in subsequent years.115 This happened at a time when great effort was made to restrict the bulk of Moroccan immigration.

Thus Micah compromises nothing of the specificity of Israel’s faith. But that faith is not aggressive or exclusionary or preemptive but generous in its welcome. In such an enterprise, there is room for moral leadership, even for a moral center. That moral center, however, is not marked by swords and spears through which nations often prefer to posture. It is, rather, marked by plowshares and pruning hooks, by attending to the realities of life such as the provision for shared food.

Mission Command embraces a conception of leadership which unsentimentally places human beings at its center. It crucially depends on factors which do not appear on the balance sheet of an organization: the willingness of people to accept responsibility; the readiness of their superiors to back up their decisions; the tolerance of mistakes made in good faith. Designed for an external environment which is unpredictable and hostile, it builds on an internal environment which is predictable and supportive. At its heart is a network of trust binding people together up, down, and across a hierarchy. Achieving and maintaining that requires constant work.15

The Practising Manager’s Growth Mantra -Growth in an enterprise is created through remarkable achievements, not incremental achievements like efficiency or effectiveness. -Remarkable achievements are possible only in complexity. -Only volitional engagement can work in complexity. Luckily, there is no certainty in complexity. Hence, motivational engagement cannot work. -People who make choices based on the purpose can only be volitionally engaged—they are the growth managers, the leaders.

Every business, no matter how old, has the opportunity and the ability to digitally remaster its products and services.

Money might be a reward (by-product) but should not always be the only goal of your efforts and enterprise.

Around the world, the perception and reality of corruption and bad governance in public places remains very high. But it isn’t just in governments that these are found; they can permeate through society, where they are rampant in private enterprises and even religious institutions. We need to deal with the causes, not just consequences. You will need to play your role, both as a good example as well as part of the social police force. Cultures and beliefs must change at a personal level as well as at institutional levels.

Credibility, however, comes from one place only: delivering results that your enterprise leadership cares about.

Africa had free markets and a thriving entrepreneurial culture and tradition centuries before these became the animating ideas of the United States or Western Europe. Timbuktu, the legendary city in northern Mali, was a famous trading post and marketplace as far back as the twelfth century, as vital to the commerce of North and West Africa as ports on the Mediterranean were to Europe and the Levant. In Africa Unchained, George Ayittey offers myriad examples of industrial activity in precolonial Africa, from the indigo-dye cloth trade of fourteenth-century Kano, Nigeria, to the flourishing glass industry of precolonial Benin to the palm oil businesses of southern Nigeria to the Kente cotton trade of the Asante of Ghana in the 1800s: “Profit was never an alien concept to Africa. Throughout its history there have been numerous entrepreneurs. The aim of traders and numerous brokers or middlemen was profit and wealth.”2 The tragedy is what happened next. These skills and traditions were destroyed, damaged, eroded or forced underground, first during centuries of slave wars and colonialism and, later, through decades of corrupt postindependence rule, usually in service to foreign ideologies of socialism or communism. No postcolonial leader in Africa who fought for independence has ever adequately explained why liberation from colonial rule necessarily meant following the ideas and philosophies of Karl Marx, a gray-bearded nineteenth-century German academic who worked out of the British Library and never set foot in Africa. At the same time, neither should we have ever allowed ourselves to become beholden to paternalistic aid organizations that were sending their representatives to build our wells and plant our food for us. Nor, for that matter, should we have relied on the bureaucrats of the Western world telling us how to be proper capitalists or—as is happening now—to Party officials in Beijing telling us what they want in exchange for this or that project. It was this outside influence—starting with colonialism but later from our own terrible and corrupt policies and leaderships—that the stereotype of the lazy, helpless, unimaginative and dependent African developed. The point is that we Africans have to take charge of our own destiny, and to do this we can call on our own unique culture and traditions of innovation, free enterprise and free trade. We are a continent of entrepreneurs.

In technology, take care not to underestimate or get caught out by the nonlinear pace of change. In culture, evaluate social acceptability and keep testing its boundaries without crossing the “creepy line.” With regulation, innovate because of it or in spite of it, treating it as a potential source of opportunity, not just an obstacle.

Physical products today can be significantly enhanced by adding combinations of the following digital elements: Sensors Displays and indicators Actuators and manipulators Microcontrollers Onboard analytics Memory Wireless-connected services Remote controls

An entrepreneurial spirit makes you someone who organizes, manages, and assumes the risks of a business enterprise, talent or calling to become an agent of change.

To succeed and create change, you must be willing to take the risk, with an understanding of a number of key elements. Please begin to understand that an entrepreneurial spirit is not only essential in business enterprise. We all have a business to run in our different areas of specialty. Your life is your business and your family is your business – you have multiple businesses.

The present goal of the individual in group enterprises is to avoid dominance; leadership is felt to be a character disorder.

The CIOs who can focus on what’s new will be relevant, but the CIOs who continue to focus on enterprise systems will be replaced.

Babolat’s Play racquet contains accelerometer and gyroscope sensors, a digital microprocessor, Bluetooth wireless communications, and a battery. All of these components weigh just fifteen grams and fit inside the handle.

Be a mission maker, so that people can be part of something worthwhile that is much bigger than themselves.

to disrupt our own business model, before someone else tries to do it for us.”3

...as we proceed to higher and higher levels of expertise, and as the stakes get higher and higher, the agonies of excellence reappear in new and frightening ways. A tiny minority gets through to the top, to memorable excellence or profound understanding. The rest of us stop at stages along the way, perhaps for a temporary rest, perhaps for a period of reassessment. But once we stop, we are unlikely to start up again. Security is suddenly far sweeter than enterprise. The sufferings of the ascent, so long endured by insuppressible aspiration, suddenly seem pointless.

GE Beliefs.” A sample belief is the explicit recognition for the need to “Deliver results in an uncertain world,” further described by three key behavioral anchors: We act with urgency, and play to win. We have the courage to make bets others won’t. We use expertise and judgment to manage risk while always acting with integrity.8 Note

In 1875, a racquet maker asked Pierre to try to make strings from animal gut, using the same process he had already mastered for violin strings. The results were revolutionary.

Commerce does not have to be a ruthless, brutal enterprise that damages people’s lives. It can be a source of happiness, healing, and hope.

digital business is the creation of new business designs by blurring the digital and physical worlds.

You are probably already familiar with digital marketing because you experience it every day. Digital business goes much deeper. It goes to the heart of what you make and serve to your customers. It redefines some of your core competencies and what you are in business to do. It could even end up placing you in a new industry— possibly one that never existed before.

Digital is no longer a backing vocal; it has moved center stage to become part of the main act. We

Gartner’s 2015 survey found that CEOs expect that revenues attributable to digital products, marketing, and sales will double from an average of 21 percent in 2014 to 42 percent in 2017.

When we say “new business designs,” we are referring to new kinds of products and services, business models, and industry models, as well as new ways of creating value for customers. “Blurring the digital and physical” means ending the traditionally clear boundary between the tangible world we live in and the virtual informational world, or “cyberspace,” typically thought of as existing inside computers. Perhaps we shouldn’t use “digital” in the definition because it’s a bit circular, but the word feels comfortable to people in a way that cyber and virtual don’t. Perhaps

If you went to bed last night as an industrial company, you are going to wake up in the morning as a software and analytics company. The notion that there’s a huge separation between the industrial world and the world of digitalization, analytics, and software— those days are over…. It’s about transitions and pivots and change; these things never happen in a moment or a day or a month but they sneak up on you and they happen suddenly and there are three changes that we are investing in that are important for our future. The first one’s the merger of physics and analytics…. The second big transition is that every customer in the industrial world now knows how to measure and value outcomes…. And the last thing is that it’s not just about GE, it’s about the extended enterprise.

In the industrial space especially, we’re seeing the number of sensors and their capabilities going up at an exponential rate,” Ruh said. “We think of this as the Internet of Things applied to the industrial space. We see the opportunity for enormous productivity and efficiency gains in energy, transportation, aviation, and healthcare through the interconnection of devices enabled via huge amounts of sensors. The key is really analytics on the data, the ability to get deep inside those assets and the processes that surround them and allow people to get more productivity and efficiency out of their assets.

He continues, “We are taking our senior executives to Singularity University in California, where we are able to see the future of the digital world and see what it means for us.” Singularity

If you don’t act, someone else will, and you run the risk of being marginalized from this opportunity space,

Ensure that the pace and type of change internally match or exceed the changes occurring externally.

This resistance often draws from a tide of powerful sentiments: “This is the way we have always done things here,” “This is what is driving today’s P&L,” or plain old “This is what we know.” Bring

Krishnamoorthy believes that resetting culture is one of the most important skills the organization possesses, noting that GE has done it several times in the past, and will continue in the future.

When you are scaling a sales team, the to-do list is endless. Hiring, training, coaching, pipeline reviews, forecasting, enterprise deal support, leadership development, and cross-functional communication are all part of the day-to-day.

But Welch also thought through another issue before deciding where to concentrate his efforts for the next five years. He asked himself which of the two or three tasks at the top of the list he himself was best suited to undertake. Then he concentrated on that task; the others he delegated. Effective executives try to focus on jobs they’ll do especially well. They know that enterprises perform if top management performs—and don’t if it doesn’t.

Worried that you’re not a born leader? That you lack charisma, the right talents, or some other secret ingredient? No need: leadership isn’t about personality or talent. In fact, the best leaders exhibit wildly different personalities, attitudes, values, and strengths—they’re extroverted or reclusive, easygoing or controlling, generous or parsimonious, numbers or vision oriented. So what do effective leaders have in common? They get the right things done, in the right ways—by following eight simple rules: Ask what needs to be done. Ask what’s right for the enterprise. Develop action plans. Take responsibility for decisions. Take responsibility for communicating. Focus on opportunities, not problems. Run productive meetings. Think and say “We,” not “I.

Success in an enterprise can be brought about, through effective leadership, which educes open communication, which in turn would contribute towards bringing down conflict levels, thus leading to higher productivity and distinguished gains, which in turn testifies about the healthy corporate culture of an organization.

They asked, “What needs to be done?” They asked, “What is right for the enterprise?” They developed action plans. They took responsibility for decisions. They took responsibility for communicating. They were focused on opportunities rather than problems. They ran productive meetings. They thought and said “we” rather than “I.

Visionary leadership is not reactive. It refuses to arrogantly offer the right solution or give the right answer. Rather, leading with vision requires that we relate to people. Dan Allender writes, Leadership is not about problems and decisions; it is a profoundly relational enterprise that seeks to motivate people toward a vision that will require significant change and risk on everyone’s part. Decisions are simply the doors that leaders, as well as followers, walk through to get to the land where redemption can be found.3 Leadership hinges on relationship, and that requires us to risk. And though I’m convinced that visionary, relational leadership is a bedrock Christian posture, we all have a disturbing bent toward relational immaturity. I see how easily I become cynical, dismissive, judgmental, and reactive. I see how quickly I’m tempted to blast back at the person who sends a critical e-mail, or judge the person who doesn’t make progress fast enough, or get impatient with those I manage who don’t accomplish exactly what I think they should. Our journey toward dealing compassionately with difficult people doesn’t simply require us to learn a bit more about others. It also requires us to become better acquainted with ourselves.

The term “organization” thus suggests a certain bareness, a lean, no-nonsense system of consciously co-ordinated activities.[1] It refers to an expendable tool, a rational instrument engineered to do a job. An “institution,” on the other hand, is more nearly a natural product of social needs and pressures—a responsive, adaptive organism. This distinction is a matter of analysis, not of direct description. It does not {6} mean that any given enterprise must be either one or the other. While an extreme case may closely approach either an “ideal” organization or an “ideal” institution, most living associations resist so easy a classification. They are complex mixtures of both designed and responsive behavior.

The formal, technical system is therefore never more than a part of the living enterprise we deal with in action. The persons and groups who make it up are not content to be treated as manipulable or expendable. As human beings and not mere tools they have their own needs for self-protection and self-fulfillment—needs that may either sustain the formal system or undermine it. These human relations are a great reservoir of energy. They may be directed in constructive ways toward desired ends or they may become recalcitrant sources of frustration. One objective of sound management practice is to direct and control these internal social pressures.

The CIO needs to be an enterprise ‘polyglot,’ to master both business language and IT terminology, and beyond.

This rich array of innovation capabilities has already begun to transform many everyday products and some industrial ones. The following examples are all available today: E-cigarette— heats liquid into a nicotine-laced vapor instead of burning tobacco Digital billboard— senses who is viewing and responds to that person Smart soccer ball— reports its speed, direction, and other data to a mobile device Augmented-reality ski goggles— show a radar-like display of skiers’ locations Car smartphone remote control— provides access to the air conditioning controls or fuel gauge Robot golf course lawnmower— repeats perfect pattern cutting of greens Crypto currencies— substitute for conventional government-issued money Smart-home lightbulbs— set precise color hue and brightness remotely

Gartner predicts that by 2020 twenty-five billion things will be connected to the Internet24 and estimates that there are at least 130 million enterprises. There are already three billion people online worldwide.25 Business times people times things (B × P × T) means that the number of possible interactions and the creative opportunities and unexpected breakthroughs and threats will grow. Explosively.

This fundamental factor leads to an unavoidable truth— the future is becoming just too complex to predict using traditional approaches. You cannot know what you will need to know. You can’t calculate and plan sufficient scenarios. Yet you must do something because the digital business world will be a turbulent and unforgiving place where winner-take-all outcomes will be common and the disrupters themselves will be disrupted.

Digital business will cause deeper business change than Internet technology created in the past. You

the most serious barrier is to be found in organizational culture, leadership, and strategy.

Each major marketplace disruption calls for a reset of culture,” Raghu Krishnamoorthy, GE’s chief learning officer, explained. “Even though it is hard to re-create for the new context, if you don’t you will not have the ability to survive.

The main anchor of our civilization must be intellectual and spiritual liberty. Ideals, invention, initiative, enterprise, and leadership spring best from free men and women. The only economic system which will not limit or destroy these forces of progress is private enterprise.17

He had no doubt that the country actually wanted internal improvements. But he knew that it did not want to pay for them, especially if this meant that Western land would not be sold cheaply, that there might be internal taxes, and that the revenue of the federal government would be increased. It also did not want to acknowledge openly, as Adams’ grand statements did, its desire for internal improvements, let alone the benefits of federal spending to local communities. Rational planning frightened those for whom big government was the ultimate evil. Many valued individualism and unregulated entrepreneurship more than social community and beneficial regulation. The American spirit, particularly in the West, contained a hefty dose of creative anarchy: the landscape existed to be turned into cash through planting, grazing, logging, mining, and hunting, at whatever cost to the earth and future generations. What the country would in the long run benefit from most, Adams proposed, was some constructive balance between individual enterprise and communal action. Government leadership and rational planning were, he believed, compatible with capitalism and private property. And the divisive issues that threatened the stability of the country could be resolved only by stronger bonds of union. Union provided security and prosperity. The most effective agents of union were public improvements. Better to go down fighting for a stronger future than to serve a second term at the cost of forfeiting the opportunities for leadership that the presidency provided. There was the long-term future to consider, and the leadership that was unsuccessful today might sow the ground for successes tomorrow.

Leadership is a potent combination of strategy and character. But if you must be without one, be without the strategy.

In private enterprise, the human resources office is the prospective employee’s first introduction to the corporation. Management must realize that the company is being appraised from the moment a bright, discerning candidate enters through the door. If he is greeted by a cheerful receptionist and led to an office that exhibits signs of good taste and stability, he will be pleasantly biased before the interview even begins.

Horizon 2: Areas of focus and accountability—The segments of our life and work that we need to maintain, to ensure stability and health of ourselves and our enterprises (e.g., health, finances, customer service, strategic planning, family, career) Horizon 3: Goals and objectives—The mid- to longer-term outcomes to accomplish (usually within three to twenty-four months); e.g., “Finalize acquisition of Acme Consulting,” “Establish profitable online version of our leadership training course,” “Get Maria’s college plans finalized” Horizon 4: Vision—Long-term desired outcomes; ideal scenarios of wild success (e.g., “Publish my memoir,” “Take the company public,” “Have a vacation home in Provence”) Horizon 5: Purpose, principles—Ultimate intention, raison d’être, and core values of a person or enterprise (e.g., “To serve the growth of our community in ways that sustainably provide the greatest good for the greatest number of our citizens”)

have always questioned acceptance of a hierarchical “ladder” of professional responsibility in schools. In a relatively flat organization with students at the center of the enterprise, most teachers need resources and support, not a supervisor.

Steve and Karen extend our view beyond the interrelationships of team, management, and leadership practices, beyond the skillful adoption of DevOps, and beyond the breaking down of silos—all necessary, but not sufficient. Here we see the evolution of holistic, end-to-end organizational transformation, fully engaged and fully aligned to enterprise purpose.

As enterprises go extinct due to leadership failure. Tomorrows leaders and enterprises are going to emerge,

Josh Chu is a seasoned technology executive with a rich background in software engineering, data science, and team leadership. Holding a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from the University of Minnesota, he has consistently thrived in roles demanding strong technical leadership. Josh boasts a remarkable track record of expanding teams, securing funding, and overseeing extensive data projects. His proficiency extends across enterprise software, SaaS, engineering, and data science, rendering him a prime candidate for a technical leadership position. Josh is a dynamic leader known for propelling innovation and fostering growth, setting the stage for a successful future.

VPs of Administration and Finance represent the interests of that business vertical. They are also strongly partial to the systems used by that business vertical. For example, within a medical university, they cannot be expected to also represent marketing; advancement; communications; business development; client relations; disease control; provost; faculty; student life; or other departments. Think about your enterprise: How can the person overseeing finance be impartial or well-informed across all your departments? Under many organizations' reporting structures, the CIO is expected to develop relationships with these other business verticals, but since they report to the CFO they are excluded from the very cabinet meetings where leaders congregate. Even when CIOs are invited, they are not considered of equal rank -- because they are not. Everyone views the CFO as the final authority for IT decisions, leading to some serious problems. In these organizations, finance drives strategy instead of strategy driving finance. IT is seen as a cost center and there is a perennial pressure to cut costs and reduce expenditures -- often at the detriment of strategy. Cybersecurity may be non-existent in these organizations. Setting appropriate salaries for CIOs and people reporting to the CIOs becomes impossible.