Diana McLain Smith

Conventional wisdom argues that when times are hard, leaders need to get tough. They need to push aside soft issues like a concern for people and relationships and focus on the cold, hard facts related to strategy, cost-cutting, results, and accountability. Nothing could be further from the truth—or less wise . . . . Continue reading Why hard times demand soft skills...

Business is not all business. No one knows this better than my friend, David Kantor, a systems theorist who for the past 50 years has applied his ideas to families and corporations with equal brilliance.

In his most recent book, Reading the Room, Kantor brings us with him as he works with the leaders of ClearFacts, a fictional fast-growing green-energy company.

Right from the start, you are in the room with Kantor, seeing what happens with and to these leaders through his eyes—or, in keeping with the book, through the eyes of fictional coach Duncan Travis. For the next 300-some pages you watch the drama unfold, as CEO Ralph Waterman and his top team deal with everything from decision rights to the childhood stories that shape their interactions and the decisions they make. Continue reading Reading the Room...

“You can develop the best strategy,” Rockefeller Foundation President Dr. Judith Rodin said in a recent Forbes interview, “but I always say that culture eats strategy for lunch. A leader must recognize that change is as much about influencing the culture as it is about influencing the domains of work.”

But just how should leaders go about influencing culture? The most common approach is to focus on written documents like value statements or mission statements, to launch communication campaigns, to redesign office arrangements, and/or to closely manage symbols—all in an effort to drive changes in cultural behavior. Trouble is, most of these efforts fall flat, even when reinforced by training, which is why design experts David Nadler and Michael Tushman say culture is the most difficult… Continue reading Leader Beware: Culture eats strategy for lunch...

Steven Spielberg knew how to make the most of bad situations. In an extraordinary 1999 interview with James Lipton on Inside the Actors Studio, the director reveals his greatness not just as a filmmaker but as a leader. Over the course of their two-hour conversation, Spielberg recounts how he was able to realize his vision even when things went wrong. And things did go wrong: from his earliest experiments to the iconic films that made his reputation.

Throughout, he was able to use conflict, constraint, fear, even bad luck to get the most out of people and situations. Here’s what he had to say about each. Continue reading Making the most of bad situations...

It’s easy for leaders to lose their way in a world of unprecedented turbulence. It’s not that things are that much tougher—economies have been more depressed, wars more devastating, poverty more intractable, disease more widespread. But never have events and circumstances shifted so quickly, so fundamentally, or so unpredictably. One day the Berlin Wall is standing, the next it’s gone. One day apartheid is the law of the land in South Africa, the next it’s gone. One day the Twin Towers are standing, the next they’re gone. One day we’re sitting on top of a growing economy, the next it’s gone. And so the list goes on, each item swept away by underlying structural changes very few saw or predicted.

Turbulence of this kind poses two fundamental challenges for leaders. Continue reading A leader’s compass and ballast in turbulent times...