Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Successful Leaders List


HSM is an organization that has a richly deserved reputation for putting together conferences that rank among the very top tier of executive education for C-Level leadership.

Last year's World Innovation Forum held in New York featured any number of A-List names, one of which was Andrew Zolli who was the closing keynote. Zolli is the founder of Z + Partners, a futures research and strategy consultancy. He also is the force behind an annual conference called Pop!Tech whose focus is on thinking, science, and technology.

To say that the business world has been searching for the Holy Grail of leadership traits, chacteristics or themes is an understatement of the first order, so when someone of Zolli's stature is willing to share some of his thoughts of the subject, it is a list worth sharing.

In his remarks, he offered up the following as the most common behaviors of successful leaders:
• Making the top of the organization accountable
• Embracing user-centered design everywhere
• Treating employees and consumers the same
• Constantly placing a lot of small bets in small increments, then managing and collapsing them
• Leveraging ambient, unused architecture
• Finding and embracing lead users
• Investing and incenting with cash
• Investing in employees before consultants and customers
• Copying existing best practices, but sparingly
• Leveraging innovations outside the company
• Embracing a portfolio management approach
• Systematically scanning for weak signals – the fringe things today that are important tomorrow
Certainly is as good as any list I've seen lately. How does it stack up against your own feelings and experience?

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