For those interests in the concept of Servant Leadership, a great resource is the Greenleaf Center for Servant Leadership in Indianapolis. They have a nice summary of his work here and a list of publications associated with Servant Leadership. You can also find his original essay here. In addition, a good resource for a faith-based application of Servant Leadership can be found here. TWU has an interesting self-profile here. - Scott J. Allen

Looking for ways to visually display things?  Check out The Grove Consultants International.

Whether it is visual planning, personal visioning, team performance, or even meeting facilitation - they have excellent visual resources to help you or your organization storyboard.  It’s a great resource.

- Michael McRee

In today’s (May 5, 2008 ) Wall Street Journal, Erin White wrote several interesting pieces about current business management thought leadership. New Breed of Business Guru Rises: Psychologists, CEOs Climb in Influence, Draw Hits, Big Fees and What Influential Business Thinkers Focus On: Top Guru’s Ponder Managers Worries, New Approaches. (subscription required)

Popular business thinkers can reap big rewards. Speakers’ bureaus say most of the top-echelon business speakers charge between $50,000 and $75,000 a pop. Among the most in-demand are “Good to Great” author Jim Collins, “Death by Meeting” author Patrick Lencioni, Dr. (Gary) Hamel, Harvard’s Prof. (Michael) Porter, and “Our Iceberg is Melting” author John Kotter, speakers’ bureaus say.

Fees are rising, notes Ron Christman, who runs executive-development workshops for nGenera Corp. and frequently hires gurus. Speakers “who five years ago might have been at 25[,000] are now at 50,” he says; less-prominent names can command $15,000. Throw in book royalties, and a top-ranked guru can reach at least $1 million a year.

Thomas H. Davenport, PhD and management professor at Babson College, compiled a ranking of influential business thinkers for the Wall Street Journal using the same methodology he used in his 2003 book, What’s the Big Idea? At the top of the 2008 list is Dr. Gary Hamel whose website is headlined by “Fortune magazine has labeled Gary Hamel “the world’s leading expert on business strategy” and The Economist calls him “the world’s reigning strategy guru.””

Unfortunately even gurus are not infallible. The first edition of Dr. Hamel’s 2000 book, Leading the Revolution “lionized” Enron Corp but thanks to some nifty editing, they were removed from subsequent printings. It’s not the first nor last time that this type of thing will happen. Seems gurus are human too, only just a little better paid.

For another view of influential business thinkers check out Thinkers 50 where Dr. Hamel currently ranks #5, up from #14 in 2005. - Peter Mello

Cross posted in Center for Leader Development and Sea-Fever blogs.

Technorati tags: Wall Street Journal, management, Dr. Gary Hamel, Dr. Thomas H. Davenport, Babson College, Enron, Thinkers 50

I have been listening to some podcasts developed by the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL).  I think they are a nice addition to their many resources.  Check them out by clicking here. - Scott J. Allen

I have had occasion to read a bit more on followership recently. Brad Jackson and Ken Parry deal with the term and its scholarship in their recent and valuable book, A Very Short, Fairly Interesting and Reasonably Cheap Book about Studying Leadership. The Art of Followership gathers a set of provocative chapters on the topic. The authors and editors of both books have interviews in a recent and forthcoming newsletter of the ILA.

Initially, I was very put off by the term because it seems to imply hierarchy and authority as companions to leadership. We have spent a great deal of scholarship over the past 30 years trying to distinguish these terms.

Ironically, the premises of this scholarship help us make these distinctions clearly. First, leadership is distributed through a group–family, group, organization, community, polity, globe–and each person has the responsibility to maintain autonomous moral decision making. Second, the followership scholarship looks to the Holocaust and the social psychological research of Milgram, Asch, Zimbardo, and others to suggest what happens when people suspend that autonomous moral decision making because of authority or group pressure.

Two landmark studies, Fromm’s Escape from Freedom and Hirschman’s Exit, Voice, and Loyalty support further the incredible importance of speaking truth to power. So there you have it leadership entails speaking truth within a hierarchy of power and to people with authority. Followership, despite the suggestion of the term, requires leadership without authority.

More to follow… Richard A. Couto