The best way to avoid sunburn is to stay inside and read these top five stories from CLOmedia.com for the week of Aug. 4.
1. Strength Is Not Enough: Overplaying strengths can be as bad as ignoring weaknesses. Strengths actually become weaknesses when overplayed or when there are corresponding gaps in organizational strength, writes Randall P. White.
2. When Ego Trumps the Company: Ego is only a few steps away from the confidence leaders need to be effective. When that ego gets too big, there are often warning signs that leaders can spot before they derail their companies and careers. David Witt has the story.
3. How Hormel Builds Its Leadership Bench: Facing a leadership gap thanks to a surge in baby boomer retirements, Hormel took a proactive stance to leadership development and replacement by targeting emerging leaders in key divisions. Katie Kuehner-Hebert has more.
4. Shut Up and Listen: When managers speak with their subordinates, the instinct to inject comments or answer questions before they've really been asked can be powerful. But to engage millennials you need to listen, writes Ladan Nikravan.
5. How to Win Friends and Influence Leaders: Development programs can only take flight if the rest of leadership is on board. Learn how to convince resistant leadership to adaop new initiatives using these tips. Andrew Fayad has the story.
Organizations are too cluttered with bureaucracy, writes The Economist this week. Corproate employees are too occupied with endless — and often pointless — meetings, unstoppable email inboxes, and general organizational complexity, likely in the form of increasing numbers of corporate mission objectives.
Writes The Economist: "Spring-cleaning needs to be reinforced by policies to stop clutter accumulating in the first place. Though it may seem obvious, Intel, a chipmaker, felt the need to impose a rule saying: no meetings without a clear purpose. Lenovo, a Chinese computer-maker, lets its staff halt meetings that are going off-track, in the same way as Toyota, a Japanese carmaker, gives production workers the power to stop assembly lines when they spot problems. Bain says a manufacturer it studied made savings equivalent to cutting 200 jobs by halving the default length of meetings to 30 minutes and limiting to seven the number of people who could attend."
Read more here.
Also, the 18 most innovative cities on earth, courtesy of Business Insider. Read here.
