In Eumenides, the final installment of Aeschylus‘ trilogy Oresteia, Orestes is tried for matricide on Areopagus, a flat rocky hill by Athens. He is tried by a jury and gets the chance to defend himself instead of falling victim to the old system of violent, tit-for-tat, revenge. The Oresteia frames the demise of a do-it-yourself revenge model to the emergence of a legal system composed of jurors, judges, and lawyers. And, if we look closely, …

Leaders are increasingly using social technology to open up lines of communication, create feedback loops, and talk directly with customers and new markets. It’s important that proactive leaders keep updated on what’s trending in the world of social networking. This week, don’t miss these stories:
1. Google Buzz is an amalgamation of Twitter, Facebook, and your Gmail account. Good luck “just” checking your email. Find out more in this video.
2. Google’s planning to offer “ultrafast internet” …

Using one hand count what you feel are the most important leadership traits. If you listed, “the ability to listen”–congratulations, you don’t need to tune into CBS’s new reality TV show, Undercover Boss.
The premise of the show is simple. They take a leader and throw him or her into the trenches of their business disguised as a normal person. A camera crew closely follows the resulting frictions and revelations by posing as documentary filmmakers researching  …

Recently, I read a new comic book entitled, Logicomix by Apostolos Doxiadis and Christos Papadimitriou, that shines light on the world of philosophy, mathematics, and….organizational leadership. Logicomix is first and foremost a story about the search for the foundations of mathematics. While the book takes a studied look at many mathematicians and logicians it focuses on the life of Bertrand Russell. The drama of the story stems from the seemingly inevitable madness of 20th century …

President Obama and the democrats are facing a fundamental leadership challenge: the challenge of not dropping the ball.
Leadership requires two fundamental skills: the ability to mobilize people and the ability to go the distance. All too often, leaders have a capacity to get people on their side, to rally them around an idea, but lose momentum by forgetting to focus on those key managerial activities that must be sustained to go the distance. …

Massachusetts is making Obama and his policy makers reevaluate the political landscape. They are going to have to make adjustments and make them soon. Of course, this is a challenge for any leader because adjustments aren’t easy and they can cause overreactions.
It seems obvious—if you have data that indicate an initiative is failing, you should be able to make adjustments. Yet sometimes inertia sets in after an evaluation has been made. You put the initiative …