Governance

True motivation must come from within. Take Bill Gates for example, one of the wealthiest people on the planet. His drive isn’t tied to financial gain – when you can wallpaper your estate with $100 bills, bonuses just don’t mean as much. Top performers, from the billionaire to the less prosperous master of a craft, often find their motivation elsewhere.

Boko Haram loosely means “Western education is sinful." This group needn’t worry about recruiting minions in the U.S., however, since American universities seem eager to further their cause with a commitment to withholding conflicting and controversial topics from their campuses.

If you need a compelling reason to appoint more women to the Board, here you’ll find several. Firms with a gender-balanced Board tend to enjoy multiple benefits, an assertion supported by several recent studies. Yet worldwide, corporate Boards are still dominated my men. Increasing diversity in the boardroom also increases conflict, lessens trust, and heightens scrutiny.

It all started peacefully enough. At 7 am, I parked my car in the underground parking garage of our Connecticut offices and hopped on the elevator.

This scenario is built from a real-life experience working for a high-tech company, but it can apply to any organization or situation you might be facing. Apart from tangible physical assets, if we own intellectual property or proprietary information, this issue is relevant.

We use sports metaphors in business and sometimes the win-win, win-lose, lose-lose stuff gets pretty confusing. Do you have to "beat" someone to "win?"

What explains the success of this nearly universal skill acquisition? And what can these answers teach us about other kinds of learning?

Printing and the cloud are seemingly at opposite ends of an organization’s infrastructure spectrum. Printing remains one of the last bastions of an organization’s infrastructure that cannot be completely virtualized, since the whole point of printing is to take something virtual and make it physical.

In recent years, unprecedented freedom has entered the workplace as companies work to inspire their employees instead of coercing them with strict sets of rules. While this may seem like risky behavior for companies in highly regulated industries, it may actually be riskier to rely on long lists of rules in our hyperconnected world.

Baloney and blarney share more than similar letter configuration. Each denotes a kind of communication that servers the speaker, but not the listener.

There is currently a lack of consensus as to exactly what good IT governance looks like. Multinational professional services firms, worldwide associations of IT professionals and top universities have all weighed in with significant contributions, producing some agreement, a lot of disagreement and occasional innovations on what constitutes leading practices.

In more than 35 years of consulting, I have found that, at the upper echelons of large organizations, natural intelligence differentiates the successful leader from the “also ran.”