The Washington Post has an ongoing series of articles and opinion pieces about leadership. Given that we are busily working on The ASTD Leadership Handbook, edited by Elaine Biech, today's guest insight by Matthew Stewart, a former management consultant--The Seduction of Leadership Gurus--caught my eye. After all, our book has an impressive lineup of leadership gurus, including Jim Collins, Jack Zenger, John Kotter, Dave Ulrich, Norm Smallwood, Ed Cohen, Len Goodstein, Ed Betof, and Bill Gentry (to name a few who got their chapters in early), so should we be looking at some racier covers to capture their seductive qualities? No? Oh well. Too bad. It coulda been fun.

Anyway, in his piece, Stewart talks about four lessons he's learned from reading the leadership literature that render the whole concept of leadership literature problematic:

• Great leadership isn't teachable. (Does that mean that the great number of books and seminars about leadership may be more about boosting the ego and filling the wallet of the leadership guru than about enabling people to become great leaders?) 
• Great leadership is a property of groups, not individuals. (In other words, great followers make great leaders. With too much emphasis on the individual at the top you lose sight of the importance of the people around the leader helping him or her to make the right decisions.)
• Great leadership is circumstantial. (You have to be in the right place at the right time, or else you may never become a great leader.)
• Great leadership can get ugly. (My immediate reaction to this is, if it's ugly, it's not great leadership. It's bad leadership. In some cases, it isn't leadership at all.)

If I understand his overall point correctly, he is saying that leadership literature tends to focus solely on the individual as great leader and fails to look at the entire system that creates the incubator for great leadership. Thus the reader may get some interesting stories and inspiration from leadership books and seminars, but doesn't get a blueprint for creating an environment that will allow great leadership to flourish.

These are some of my general reactions to Stewart's piece:

• What exactly is the leadership literature that he is talking about? I have come across quite a few books that discuss the setting for leadership and not just the characteristics of the individual.   
• What is the point of providing leadership training or writing books about leadership? Although there are always those who are cynically just in it for the money or to feel good about themselves, my experience with authors is that they genuinely want to share their experience in the hope that it will help someone do something better. Most of us have learned at least one lesson the hard way and would like to help others bypass that experience. Furthermore, I would argue that leadership behaviors can be learned, although becoming a great leader requires experience and practice. In that way, it is similar to painting: You can learn the basic techniques, the types of brushes to use, the characteristics of various types of thinners and pigments, but you won't become a great painter without the practice and the experience.
• I like his idea that leadership books that focus on "charismatic leaders [who] have mastered the very forces of nature and can squeeze profits out of rocks with their bare hands" isn't a good way "to develop the practices of participation and accountability that characterize those systems that are capable of producing good leadership." In other words, sole reliance on this type of leadership book, especially in a training or business school setting, may not be such a great idea. But once again, that gets us back to my first point: What are these books? There are others out there that focus on the larger picture. 

Anyway, these are just a few of my thoughts about leadership literature and Stewart's article. I have more, but am not yet fully able to articulate them. I'd like to hear what you have to say about the subject though!

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A few days ago, a copy of the latest book in the Ultimate series, Ultimate Basic Business Skills: Training an Effective Workforce, landed on my desk. Like all the books in this new series, it follows a similar format as the ASTD Trainer's WorkShop series, providing everything you could possibly ask for to quickly put together a training program. It includes guidelines for designing programs, agendas, learning activities, tools, assessments, and PowerPoint slides that can be customized as well as printed for use as class handouts.

The topics of the book are the basic business skills that everyone needs to function succesfully, effectively, and efficiently in the business environment, such as customer service, basic communication, presentations, networking, conflict management, writing, problem solving, decision making, and much more. These are foundational skills that newcomers to the business environment need, but the rest of us could also use some polish on. To learn more about the book and what it provides, check out the Ultimate Basic Business Skills webpage and download the sample chapter.

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I had a productive day setting up webpages for some of our forthcoming books. One of those is Brian Lambert's 10 Steps to Successful Sales. Brian is our in-house guru of all things sales related (earlier this year his book World-Class Selling: New Sales Competencies with its competency model for sales training was launched at the ASTD International Conference & Exposition in Washington, DC), and his latest book really delivers. He presents 10 steps for successful sales. To learn more about the book, check out the new 10 Steps to Successful Sales web page, which includes a sample chapter as a download, as well as Brian's own webpage devoted to the topic.

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Even though I do my job pretty well and I have a great relationship with my manager, I dread that annual performance review. It just gives me an icky feeling: now it's time to talk about stuff that's not going well, or to listen to feedback about how I can do better. Even positive feedback makes me feel a little squirmy and embarrassed. So it's not something I look forward to. In terms of how I improve as a performer, it frequently leads to a lot of short-term activity surrounding the review (sort of like that short-term activity surrounding those New Year's resolutions), which then tapers off until work settles down to the usual. (Basically this sort of curve is true for a lot of activities that we do to improve performance; think about training: you attend a training event, when you are done you do lots of things to try to apply it, and then things slowly settle down again. Maybe a few things stick, but a lot goes by the wayside and isn't that frustrating?)

Anyway, back to the performance review: I guess that I am not alone in feeling pretty uncomfortable about the annual review. I certainly know that Jeffrey and Linda Russell, authors of Ultimate Performance Management, a new book that addresses just this topic, do. So they came up with a solution, a new way to approach to managing performance that goes way beyond the annual check-the-box performance review. They came up with the Great Performance Management Cycle and the concept of performance coaching conversations. These are ongoing processes that enable employees like me to get better and better at their jobs and allow managers like my awesome boss (I know, I am totally sucking up, aren't I?) to get better and better results from their people.

I am not going to explain this cycle though, I am going to let the authors do it themselves in the sample chapter that's available on their book webpage. Now, this sample chapter is unusually long and I argued with myself a while before putting it up there, but I think the contents are really interesting while the real value of the book is in the application. Ultimate Performance Management provides everything you need to know to assess, implement, and train people on this way of improving people's performance. You get all you need to be able to put on five workshops, including learning activities, tools, handouts, training instruments, as well as processes and procedures. This is a book that has real potential to improve the ways that people work, so check out the sample and see what you think.

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So, Twitter. Twitter, Twitter, Twitter. Tweet. Tweet. Tweet. 

What do you do with it? I am still trying to figure it out. I sort of get it, but then I don't. As a member and employee of an organization that aims to lead the profession, it's part of my job to try to figure it out. Thing is, it's pretty new, so its potential is not fully explored yet. What does that mean? It means that any smart, creative, innovative (and potentially unscrupulous) person can come up with a new way to use it. That's always exciting. And it's overwhelming.

An article at Time.com lists 10 ways that businesses can use Twitter, including marketing and advertising, getting (and affecting) stock prices, providing news, getting consumer data, disseminating content, and more. Jeanne Meister has talked about several ways that companies can use Twitter on her blog, including as a recruiting tool.

One of the most enjoyable applications of Twitter that I have come across is the line-by-line retelling of the Indian epic the Mahabharata (@epicretold), which is great for geeky ancient literature lovers like myself, but also suggests other applications such as providing training tips and tools, introducing the contents of a new book, and so on.

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A few days ago, I was searching around on the web for information about leadership (in relation to a new project with Elaine Biech for a Leadership Handbook, but more on that another time), when I stumbled across an article by one of ASTD Press's authors, Alexandra Levit. In the September-October issue of The Futurist, she writes about the future world of work, from her perspective as a Gen Xer. As a Gen Xer myself, I was interested in what she had to say. These are some of the trends that she sees on the horizon:

• We'll have to deal with the loss of brain power as Boomers in management start to retire in droves, and we'll have more diverse work places with Boomers who work for personal fulfillment and immigrants to make up the loss of brain power.
• The companies that we work for will get smaller, as everything that can be outsourced will be outsourced.
• Many of us won't actually be full-time employees of organizations; instead, we'll be consultants and temporary workers.
• Because we can work from various locations, we will. As a result, the work day will grow longer and more flexible.  
• The projects that we work on will change constantly, requiring that we be flexible and adaptive.

Alexandra thinks that these things sound exciting, but I am trying to decide what I think about it.... Well, I can recognize some of the excitement in it, certainly. The ability to work on the fly, to shift tactics quickly, to adapt--it all has a kind of video-game feel that's kind of fun, how fast can you go and how fast can you get out of way of the objects flying at you (for some reason, all I can picture is a roller rink with an assortment of obstacles rolling past that you have to duck). Also, the potential independence of a situation where you are your own employee, working on a project-by-project basis for an organization. That's kind of nice, too.

But there are some downsides as well. For example, I already don't like how much work creeps into home life and the work day expands, expectations of your availability change too. Also, there's a lot to be said for the value of being part of an organization, the value of contributing to something larger than yourself on an ongoing basis. So there are pluses and minuses. Anybody else have a thought?

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Hi folks:

A new book project that we are working on for 2010 is a book about using social media for business success. The author for this book, Darin Hartley, just started a blog at http://soc-net-for-biz.blogspot.com/ to solicit content from you, John and Jane Q Public, to put in the book. So if you have any interesting stories, case studies, examples, etc., to share, get on over to his blog and let him know about it.

This is actually sort of a first stab at getting you, the reader, involved in co-creating ASTD content. One of the things that we are trying to do here in the Press is to forge a stronger connection with our audience and create a community, so please feel free to contact us and let us know what you are thinking, what you think that we should be covering, and so forth. Obviously, we won't be able to cover everything, but it does gives us the chance to hear more directly from you about what you would like to read about.

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Now, I've been known to get bogged down in editorial details, raging on about inappropriate commas, obsessing over inconsistent numbering of tables and figures, despairing that a book published with an incorrect running head, fuming over passive voice, walking the streets wild-eyed and muttering "the gerund, the gerund!" Well, maybe not that last bit, but you get the point: I am a picky editor who at times cares too much about minutiae.

That said, here's a story I heard that made me furious. Once upon a time, there was an editor who received a typeset manuscript that was red with markups. In response to these bloody proofs, the editor said something along the lines of "Look, we are not getting into the nitty gritty here. No one is looking at those things anyway."

Well...where do I start? I have so much to say about this statement and about this attitude in general. Do I start with, "YES WE ARE PICKING NITS HERE! WE ARE EDITORS!" Probably not. Yelling isn't usually very productive.

OK, so let me start again. This statement makes me particularly steamed because it involves the failure of an editor to recognize the importance of getting details right. Rebelling against editorial and typographical rules does not result in liberation and time savings; it results in poor quality, failure to communicate, and loss of credibility. It means that we don't respect the author and we don't respect our customer, the reader, enough to convey ideas and information with clarity, precision, and elegance.

I think the statement also rankles because it suggests that those of us who do care about getting details right are slow, doddering, old fuddy-duddies who are too unhip to grasp today's need for speed. Well, I get the need for speed. Or do I? We always hear that the world keeps changing faster and faster, and we have to keep up. But speed too often trumps quality and value--and that's especially true in editorial. What if we slowed down a little and got it right? Did it well? Would we really lose so much?  

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Elaine's newest book (which will be available for purchase from ASTD Press on July 25!) is at the printer, and the proofs looked good, so we are pretty excited to see that come in. In the meantime, you can get a sneak preview of a sample chapter from the book here.

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I just picked the July issue of Infoline out of my inbox to skim through and found myself reading the entire issue cover to cover. "Lead the Green Evolution" by Katherine Holt, Tom Bepler, Kate Grace MacElveen, and Carol Stoner is a good issue for people interested getting started on a greener path, both as individuals and as a leaders within their organizations (both with and without formal authority). This Infoline suggests a lot of small and big initiatives that can have an impact on slowing and perhaps eventually reversing climate change.

As the authors point out, going green is currently trendy, but it's really a much more important and fundamental change in our way of life--one that needs to take place if we want a livable planet. I frequently read or hear in the news that the huge changes needed to slow climate and reverse climate change are impossible over such short periods of time, but I don't buy it. Think about the radical and extremely fast retooling of the American industrial system needed to respond to World War II. Or what the changes that have taken place in the way that people do business because of technologies ranging from personal computers to the Internet to Twitter and iPhones? We can change fast if we want to change.

Anyway, this is an issue I care about, even though I haven't made as much personal progress on going green as I would like (although I try to make inroads all the time), so I am liable to get soap-boxy about it, but the Infoline is not soap-boxy at all; in fact, it provides some very good incentives for going green, including saving money, attracting and retaining talent, and attracting customers, as well as a lot of ideas for ways to implement greener business practices. So why not check it out? And in keeping with the green theme: Why not get it as a PDF?

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