A good place to start in understanding someone is to check out their library. What you read often becomes what you think. At the very least it is part of the web of influence on one’s thinking and approach to their work.
So I thought I’d start my blog proper by listing some of my favourite authors and other influences upon my professional work.
Henry Mintzberg
Nearly everyone interested in management and leadership will know Mintzberg. He embodies the “think different” ethos and continues to make valuable contrarian contributions on classrooms being poor places to learn management, what managers really do, leadership, airlines and what ever else catches his gaze.
A great thought leader.
http://www.henrymintzberg.com/
Bandura
Albert Bandura is one of the great under-recognised psychologists. His greatest contribution in my opinion has been the concept of self efficacy. I have found this to probably be the single most useful concept in my practice of coaching and leadership development. I suspect his popularity has suffered from his particularly impenetrable writing style but repeated readings are rewarded with brilliant ideas that can make a great difference to people’s confidence in themselves and their capability to succeed.
This site is probably the best introduction to his ideas and how they can be used:
http://des.emory.edu/mfp/self-efficacy.html#bandura
Morgan W McCall Jr
I’ve only recently rediscovered Morgan McCall‘s work on the importance of experiential learning in developing leadership capability. His work at the Centre for Creative Leadership ( a great institution that has been a strong influence on our own approach to leadership development) in the mid 80s created the now famous 70 20 10 rule which we constantly refer to in our work. This rule says that in developing leadership:
70% of the learning comes from challenging workplace experiences
20% comes from supportive and encouraging relationships – supervisors, mentors, coaches and colleagues, and just
10% is from traditional sources of learning such as training, reading and education.
Our conundrum is that if this is true (most people accept this at face value but the research seems to also support it) why do most leadership training and development program focus on the 10% at the expense of the 70%?
This is something we address in our latest newsletter “Leader Training – A waste of time and money”. We hope this is provocative and we would love to start a debate on this. Have a read and let us know what you think.
That’s enought for now. I’ll list some more authors in my next post.
