Leadership Process Essay Example for Free

Leadership Process Essay First Section Leadership is a process by which one person influences the thoughts, attitudes, and behaviors of others. Leaders set a direction for the rest of us; they help us see what lies ahead; they help us visualize what we might achieve; they encourage us and inspire us. Level 5 leadership refers to the highest level in a hierarchy of executive capabilities that we identified during our research. Leaders at the other four levels in the hierarchy can produce high degrees of success but not enough to elevate companies from mediocrity to sustained excellence. And while Level 5 leadership is not the only requirement for transforming a good company into a great one—other factors include getting the right people on the bus (and the wrong people off the bus) and creating a culture of discipline—our research shows it to be essential. Good-to-great transformations don’t happen without Level 5 leaders at the helm. They just don’t. (Traylor, 2001) The Level 5 leader sits on top of a hierarchy of capabilities and is, according to our research, a necessary requirement for transforming an organization from good to great. But what lies beneath? Four other layers, each one appropriate in its own right but none with the power of Level 5. Individuals do not need to proceed sequentially through each level of the hierarchy to reach the top, but to be a full-fledged Level 5 requires the capabilities of all the lower levels, plus the special characteristics of Level 5. (HBR, 2001) It differs from other leadership styles as the leaders come from the grass root of the organization. Meaning, it is the leader who has grown and developed from the ground level of the organization and has gradually escalated towards the top most level. This allows an employee to go through all phases and nurture to the top level of the organization i.e. CEO level. A few years ago in Strategy Leadership, Michael Raynor debunked the premises on which the shareholder-first model rests, and a few months ago Michael Porter criticized the current belief that looking beyond the business is bad for business. In the January/February Harvard Business Review he argues that companies should be considering other stakeholders, and so generates economic value by creating societal value. These respected thinkers offer another answer to the question about the purpose of a business: the firm should see itself as an interdependent part of a community that consists of multiple stakeholders whose interests are integral to business success. In this view, an enterprise can be seen as a system of long-term cooperative relationships between affected parties. (Collins, 2001) These include the firm’s managers and employees, customers and clients, investors, suppliers, the towns, states and nations where the firm is located or sells goods and services and even future generations of stakeholders. In such a system, stakeholder influence generates pressure for the organization to behave in ethical and environmentally and socially responsible ways, and in turn, this interdependency helps the firm be sustainable and resilient. This alternative approach to leadership is variously referred to as ‘‘sustainable,’’ ‘‘Rhineland’’ or ‘‘honeybee’’ leadership. By sustainable we don’t just mean a firm is being green and socially responsible. Research and observations in over 50 firms around the world, including in many listed corporations, suggest that sustainable leadership requires taking a long-term perspective in making decisions; fostering systemic innovation aimed at increasing customer value; developing a skilled, loyal and highly engaged workforce; and offering quality products, services and solutions. (Caroselli, 2003) Second Section In 2005, Lee Scott, ex-CEO and President of Wal-Mart Stores and now Chairman of its Executive Committee, announced that the company would essentially adopt sustainable leadership principles going forward, although he did not use that term. Financial performance was solid, but the company was the target of many complainants – employees, local communities, suppliers, and environmentalists. Scott decreed that Wal-Mart, one of largest Fortune 500 corporations, would become more ethical, and more socially and environmentally responsible. The company would use its political might to benefit ordinary Americans in healthcare and energy savings, and make people’s lives better. Scott even advocated paying more for products from ethical suppliers – an extraordinary reversal by an enterprise built around a low-cost strategy. In the years since, Wal-Mart has experimented with environmentally-friendly stores and other socially-responsible measures. Interestingly, its bottom line has not suffered during this process, posting net sales increases for the past five years, according to Wal-Mart’s 2009 annual report. In recent months, in a move to improve the healthiness of its products, the firm announced plans to reduce the fat and salt in its house brand groceries and cut prices on fresh produce. (Shaw, 2005) A considerable body of evidence shows that sustainable practices are more likely to enhance business performance than the shareholder-first approach. First, various writers have examined and compared the Anglo/US system with its Rhineland counterpart, concluding that Rhineland principles are more sustainable and lead to better outcomes than the shareholder-first approach. Second, Avery and Bergsteiner have gathered extensive evidence for each of the individual practices in their pyramid model, showing how they are more likely to contribute to positive business outcomes than their counterparts under the shareholder-first model. For example, a major difference between shareholder-first and sustainable practices lies in whether they retain people or lay them off when times get difficult. Staff retention is regarded as a foundation element in the pyramid because conditions aimed at keeping staff can be initiated at any time. However, retaining staff supports various higher order outcomes in the pyramid; it allows knowledge to be retained, and supports quality, trust, and innovation, for example, and enhances financial performance, as well as staff and customer satisfaction. Similar cases can be made for the other 22 elements. (Cooke, 2008) What senior executive would reject these as legitimate goals for an enterprise seeking to both thrive and endure? To some cynics, sustainable leadership – a management approach aimed at delivering better and more sustainable returns, reducing unwanted employee turnover and accelerating innovation – sounds too good to be true. They dismiss it as just another form of humanistic management, merely good management practices, or as following old-fashioned values. There is some truth in each of these characterizations. Certainly, sustainable leadership embraces aspects of humanistic management in that it includes valuing people and considering the firm as a contributor to social well being. The individual practices of sustainable leadership are not new: B Warren Bennis advocated recruiting, training, and employing an effective top leadership team rather than just relying on the heroic CEO. He also proposed that firms become financially transparent as a step to becoming more ethical. B Peter Drucker wanted managers to promote change and allow innovations to come from all over the organization, thereby enabling ordinary people to make extraordinary things happen. B Stephen Covey urged using the knowledge and engagement of a firm’s employees. What is new is the understanding that these practices form a self-reinforcing leadership system that enhances the performance of a business and its prospects for survival. What is also significant is that sustainable leadership practices are diametrically opposed to the typical shareholder-first approach, which business schools, management journals, the media, and many practitioners continue to promote. (Branson, 2010) Sustainable leadership in practice Sustainably-led organizations have been identified across different sectors, countries, institutional contexts, and markets. Examples of successful enterprises that consistently embrace sustainable leadership principles abound, particularly among privately-held firms and SMEs. Unlisted companies displaying virtually all of the 23 characteristics of a sustainable enterprise include: in the USA, WL Gore Associates (Goretexw and other products) and SAS (software); in Germany, Giesecke Devrient (bank notes and securities) and Ka ¨rcher (cleaning solutions); and in Switzerland, Endress Hauser (flow technologies) and Migros (retail conglomerate). However, it is likely to be more difficult for listed corporations or private equity groups to operate on sustainable principles because of the pressures on them to achieve short-term performance goals. Yet numerous listed enterprises manage to operate sustainably, if necessary by standing up to or managing their relationships with the financial markets. Well-known examples include Germany’s Munich Re from the finance industry; Colgate (consumer goods) based in the USA; Britain’s BT Group (telecommunications); the Thai construction corporation, Siam Cement Group, and its competitor from Switzerland, Holcim. (Streshly Gray, 2010) Third Section There are many obstacles in changing to sustainable leadership. First, sticking with conventional wisdom is comfortable and easy – it’s business as usual. Second, change is disruptive and initially creates both financial and intangible costs, although as the Wal-Mart case shows these may not slow growth and profits. Third, most people disregard hard evidence and make their decisions on the basis of ideological beliefs. Managers are no exception to this human foible despite their training and experience in decision making. Fourth, major change involves risks, bringing with it the chance of a drop in short-term performance, so stakeholders need to be prepared to focus on the long term. Finally, radical change can take a long time to embed and then maintain. A major Australian bank converted from a shareholder-first strategy to a sustainable leadership model. The change took a decade to take hold, with outstanding results, but unraveled in only a few years to under a new CEO with a different agenda. The choice to adopt a more sustainable strategy, one that research and practice show leads to higher resilience and performance over the long term, remains in the hands of each executive team. Unfortunately, executives remunerated on a short-term basis may have no incentive for seriously pursuing long-term change, to the detriment of shareholders and other stakeholders. This is where the fundamental short-term focus of the shareholder-first or business-as-usual model begins to destroy shareholder value and endanger a firm’s very survival. (Brown, 2005) References Branson, D. M. (2010). The last male bastion: gender and the CEO suite in Americas public companies. Taylor Francis. Brown, M. T. (2005). Corporate integrity: rethinking organizational ethics, and leadership. Cambridge University Press. Caroselli, M. (2003). The business ethics activity book: 50 exercises for promoting integrity at work. AMACOM Div American Mgmt Assn. Collins, J. C. ( 2001). Good to great: why some companies make the leapand others dont. Harper Business. Cooke, P. (2008). Branding Faith: Why Some Churches and Non-Profits Make a Difference and Others Dont. Gospel Light. Shaw, K. A. (2005). The intentional leader. Syracuse University Press. Streshly, W. A., Gray, S. P. (2010). Leading Good Schools to Greatness: Mastering What Great Principals Do Well. Corwin Press. Traylor, P. S. (2001). IT Takes Two. CIO Magazine , Vol.15, No.4, November 15

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BRASS MASTERS, INC. â€Å"Serving your brass needs since 1950† February 26, 2014 Ms. Sabrina Nilufar Talbot Laboratories, Inc. 104 South Wright Street Urbana, IL 61801-2958 Dear Ms. Nilufar, I am pleased to report that the testing of your brass wedges is complete. You will find included a summary of our findings along with charts and micrographs of our results. A full laboratory report is available upon request. You are free to use these results as needed and to publish them as documentation for your finished brass products. Four brass wedges were tested. Two were cold rolled to a thickness of 5.0 mm and two were cold rolled to a thickness of 2.5 mm. One wedge of each thickness was then annealed for 1 hour at 350  °C. Because the wedges varied in thickness across the length, multiple cold work values were able to be recorded. Hardness and thickness measurements were taken before and after the cold rolling and after the annealing as shown in Figure 1. Generally, as cold work increased, hardness increased. As the wedges were rolled, the width slightly increased and the length significantly i...

English for Specific Purposes

2 The development of ESP The best laid schemes o' mice and men Gang aft a-gley. (Robert Burns) From its early beginnings in the 1960s ESP has undergone three main phases of development. It is now in a fourth phase with a fifth phase starting to emerge. We shall describe each of the five phases in greater detail in later chapters, but it will provide a useful perspective to give a brief summary here. It should be pointed out first of all that ESP is not a monolithic universal phenomenon.ESP has developed at different speeds in different countries, and examples of all the approaches we shall describe can be found operating somewhere in the world at the present time. Our summary must, therefore, be very general in its focus. It will be noticeable in the following overview that one area of activity has been particularly important in the development of ESP. This is the area usually known as EST (English for Science and Technology). Swales (1985) in fact uses the development of EST to illu strate the development of ESP in general: ‘With one or two exceptions†¦English for Science and Technology has always set and continues to set the trend in theoretical discussion, in ways of analysing language, and in the variety of actual teaching materials. ‘ We have not restricted our own illustrations to EST in this book, but we still need to acknowledge, as Swales does, the pre-eminent position of EST in the ESP story. 1. The concept of special language: register analysis This stage took place mainly in the 1960s and early 1970s and was associated in particular with the work of Peter Strevens (Haliiday, Mcintosh and Strevens, 1964), Jack Ewer (Ewer and Latorre, 1969) and John Swales (1971).Operating on the basic principle that the English of, say, Electrical Engineering constituted a specific register different from that of, say, Biology or of General English, the aim of the analysis was to identify the grammatical and lexical features of these registers Teachin g materials then took these linguistic features as their syllabus A good example of such a syllabus is that of A Course in Basic Scientific-English by Ewer and Latorre (1969) (see below p. 26). In fact, as Ewer and Latorre's syllabus shows, egister analysis revealed that there was very little that was distinctive in the sentence grammar of Scientific English beyond a tendency to favour particular forms such as the present simple tense, the passive voice and nominal compounds. It did not, for example, reveal any forms that were not found in General English. But we must be wary of making unfair criticism. Although there was an academic interest in the nature of registers of English per se, the main motive behind register analyses such as Ewer and Latorre's was the pedagogic one of making the ESP course more relevant to learners' needs.The aim was to produce a syllabus which gave high priority to the language forms students would meet in their Science studies and in turn would give low priority to forms they would not meet, Ewer and Hughes-Davies (1971), for example, compared the language of the texts their Science students had to read with the language of some widely used school textbooks. They found that the school textbooks neglected some of the language forms commonly found in Science texts, for example, compound nouns, passives, conditionals, anomalous finites (i. e. mod-.! verbs).Their conclusion was that the ESP course should, therefore, give precedence to these forms. 2. Beyond the sentence: rhetorical or discourse or analysis There were, as we shall see, serious flaws in the register analysis-based syllabus, but, as it happened, register analysis as a research procedure was rapidly overtaken by developments in the world of linguistics. Whereas in the first stage of its development, ESP had focussed on language at the sentence level, the second phase of development shifted attention to the level above the sentence, as ESP became closely involved with the emerging field of discourse or rhetorical analysis.The leading lights in this movement were Henry Widdowson in P

Animals And Bill Of Rights - Free Essay Example

Sample details Pages: 1 Words: 349 Downloads: 9 Date added: 2019/10/30 Category Law Essay Level High school Tags: Bill Of Right Essay Did you like this example? Is there a line between giving animals rights and giving them straight on citizenship? Is there a such a thing as too much of a good thing? Why is it now that we just decide to consider animal thoughts, whats changed? Take this into consideration, why would we even think of creating a bill of rights for animals, taking time to make something we wont even get to see the fruits of our labor for? Animals dont hold the capacity to feel or they wont be there to appreciate or even understand what this would mean. To take such drastic measures for such a non-impactful idea would not only be silly, but downright ridiculous.. Don’t waste time! Our writers will create an original "Animals And Bill Of Rights" essay for you Create order   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   According to Julia Fronkoskys article on animal welfare, posted on the MSUs website she states, she claims that it has become a status quo now and that people just see them as food and entertainment. Although this may be true to some extent, most people love animals. Thats just as bad as saying all men are abusive because the ones I have seen are abusive. There needs to be some substance there, most people want to help out, most people want to make a difference. Although, there is a point to be made, weve commercialized animals so much that to some extent, its not fair to them and there does need to be some change, but to create a plain out bill of rights? Thats a little excessive.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   To create an animal bill of rights would create so many issues. We need to worry about fixing our government, our judicial system, about so many other things before we can even think about creating something like that. If we were to have the passion we have about animal rights that we had about human rights, then this wouldnt even be an issue. A lot of cases that come from animal abuse arent just from labs, but from homes as well. If we can get the idea in our heads that hey, maybe this goes deeper, than we could find another way to solve this.