Category: leadership
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Best Practices Are Killing Us
A friend of mine recently made the following comment: “[T]he dresses & hairstyles worn at the Emmy’s were really boring & predictable. Bring back the days before the stars paid stylists, please!” While I do not watch awards shows, the comment struck me, because it applies equally well to management and leadership. Today’s obsession with…
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Video Dialogue: Activate, Don't Engage
My friend John Creighton and I have been talking about the shift in public life from an “institution centric” world to a “citizen centric” world. People no longer organize their lives and activities for the convenience of institutions, instead, they expect institutions to conform to their expectations. In this context, we propose that the notion…
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Video Interview: New Challenges When Public Leaders Engage The Public
My friend John Creighton and I have been discussing and writing about a shift that has taken place from an “institution-centric” world to a “citizen-centric” world. The question for public leaders is how to respond to this new ecosystem. We are creating videos about a number of different aspects to this question, and also working…
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Video Interview: Public Leadership Beyond Institutions
John Creighton and I have been thinking a lot about a big shift that’s been happening over the last 20 years. It’s a shift that’s been happening everywhere, but it is having a big impact in our public life. This is the shift from a world ruled by institutions to a world where individual people…
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This Is What Leadership Looks Like
Last week, a story was circulating through social media platforms that illuminated a real bonehead move by Amazon. It was deleting copies of George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm from people’s Kindles without their knowledge. Turns out the books being deleted from the popular e-readers were unauthorized editions, and in the Kindle terms of service…
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Yes You Can Destroy Your Organization Responsibly
As many of my readers and friends know, I am a firm believer that not all organizations need to exist in perpetuity. Especially in the community benefit sector, my feeling is that most organizations would do well to plan to close their doors in fifteen years from inception. Even if you aren’t planning to close…
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My Taxonomy Of Community Participants: The 90-9-1 "Principle" In Person
Among people who work in, study, and manage online communities, there’s something called the “90-9-1 Principle.” The idea is that in most online communities, 90 percent of the users are audience members, passively reading posts and comments. Nine percent of the users are “editors” editing posts (in wiki-style communities) or adding comments (in blog-style or…
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Nine Tips For Better Meetings
Especially among nonprofits and community organizations, meetings are a plague. They seem to be called at the drop of a hat, they run over time, and all too often the chief result of one meeting is another meeting. But if you focus on the purpose of the meeting, and follow some simple guidelines, meetings can…
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Seven Steps To Happy Volunteers
My friend Cindy (who also collaborates with me on Rockville Central), is a formidable community volunteer, both in her work and in her personal life. She’s been on both sides of the volunteer aisle — being a volunteer, and leading other volunteers. Together, we formed the leadership team at the helm of a local Cub…
Brad Rourke 