Leadership That Breaks Your Nose

Sean Fitzpatrick is a legend of international rugby and international sport. He was captain of the New Zealand rugby team, the All Blacks. He played 92 international rugby matches for the All Blacks from 1986 to 1998, including a world record 63 consecutive Test matches and 51 Test matches as captain of New Zealand. He captained the All Blacks in the classic 1995 World Cup Final against South Africa.

Here his take on leadership, teamwork, and rugby (football to most of the world).

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How to Commit to a Goal

Here’s a brief story about why we all sometimes get distracted from the most important goals in our lives. Perhaps you recognise it?

You are thinking about changing your job because your boss is a pain and you’re stagnating. As the weeks pass you think about how good it would feel to work for an organisation that really valued you. You think this might be a good goal to commit to but…

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How Creative Is Your Team?

Are you creative? Try this simple test…

The well-known known illusion above can be seen in two ways: as both a duck and a rabbit. Which do you see first? And if you see one, can you also see the other?

Most people see the duck first and can flip between the two representations, but the question is: how easy is it for you to flip between them? Does it require real mental strain, or can you do it at will?

Wiseman et al. (2011) had a hunch that the ability to flip between representations is related to creativity.

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Why Organizations Secretly Fear Creative Ideas

Why are creative ideas often rejected in favour of conformity and uniformity?

Does society really value creativity? People say they want more creative people, more creative ideas and solutions, but do they really?

For all the talk of creativity in business, industry and academia, there’s evidence that it’s implicitly discouraged in these areas as well. Although leaders of organisations say they want creative ideas, the evidence suggests creativity gets rejected in favour of conformity and uniformity (Staw, 1995 cited in Mueller et al., 2011).

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6 Ways to Kill Creativity

Want your organisation to perform poorly? Here are six ways to kill creativity in business, or anywhere.

Many organisations claim they want to foster creativity—and so they should—but unintentionally, through their working practices, creativity is killed stone dead.

That’s what Teresa Amabile, now Director of the Harvard Business School, found when looking back over decades of her research in organisations (Amabile, 1998). As part of one research program she examined seven companies in three different industries, having team members report back daily on their work.

After two years she found marked differences in how organisations dealt with creativity.

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Do Less (or, Why Managers Should Stop Micromanaging and Trust Their Employees)

In looking at the great leaders of history—whether they are political leaders like Julius Caesar or business leaders like Steven P. Jobs—many people probably assume that they must have taken a particularly active role in running their organizations. Caesar, after all, personally led his troops into Gaul, and Jobs was famous for checking the design of even the smallest inner workings of every product at Apple.

“Most leaders do too much,” Murnighan says. “And when they do, they’re seen as micromanagers.”

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