A Goose Learns to Lead: Meet Gregory

I just returned from a mind-altering three-day thought leadership summit in Connecticut, hosted by Judith Glaser, author of Creating We and The DNA of Leadership (both of which are landmark books for leading change and ensuring alignment in your organization or team).

At the summit, which we collectively titled The First International Creating We Summit, we engaged in deep conversation and shared the most groundbreaking tools for facilitating real change. Present were the leading thinkers from a variety of disciplines, including organizational development, neuroscience, psychology, and more. The mutual benefits and shared learnings were so great that we realized we need to keep working together on an ongoing basis.

Rest assured, more will come from this, so stay tuned. Meanwhile, we got to preview a new video from Judith Glaser, called The Leadership Secrets of Gregory Goose. Don't let the title, or the simplicity, fool you. This animated short packs a wallop in its short 6 1/2 minutes, and is bound to generate discussion among leadership teams who watch it. The purpose of the video is to help leaders understand how sharing power releases the leadership instincts in others.

Here's a brief snippet, along with information for ordering it (the package comes with a facilitators guide and power point presentation, so you can conduct your own workshop with the video). If you order it, tell them PMThink sent you.

The Leadership Secrets of Gregory Goose by Judith E. Glaser :: Benchmark Communications, Inc.

Chaos and Order: The Ingredients for Project Success

In my upcoming book, Managing the Gray Areas, there's a chapter on the need for both structure and flexibility----order and disorder. I've been exchanging some emails on the subject with Garry Booker of Project Frontier, who I'm happy to say is our newest PMThink blogger.

As it happens, Garry has been on the same path lately, and has been writing on the idea of managing outcomes (which require order) and actions (which by nature are chaotic) with the goal of achieving a chaordic organization.

A chaord (a term coined by leadership guru and former Visa CEO Dee Hock, made up from the words "chaos" and "order") refers to a state where systems and life "thrive on the edge of chaos with just enough order to give them pattern, but not so much to slow their adaptation and learning." In a chaordic organization, neither hierarchy or anarchy rule.

This is food for thought for project managers, PMO leaders, and executives.

More to come. Meanwhile, here are some links to definitions, and more about Dee Hock.

http://www.chaordic.org/definitions.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dee_Hock

Align IT and Business on Critical Projects

Leadership alignment sessions, daily status reports during critical phases, and workforce collocation are all valuable techniques for aligning IT and the business on important IT projects and ensuring expectations are met. ...

... "one of the first things that he and other project leaders did was to collocate 20 business managers with 40 IT workers to help them stay in sync on the project's products and timetables. " ...

Via Computerworld: Customer Expectations on IT Projects