Jonathan Alter in The Promise: President Obama, Year One uses his self-described “unique access” to the President and the White House to write a “behind the scenes” account of President Obama’s first year in office. In doing so, he provides a look at the major players as they tackled historic challenges and insights into the personality, character, and decision-making strategy of the new President.
Early in book, Alter writes, “[Obama's] first task was triage.”
Before assuming the …

Organizational leadership is a question of balance, focus, and consistency. Leaders in organizations have to sustain the consistency of a perpetual campaign while keeping an eye on the ball, as well as constituents, agendas, allies, resistors, strategies, and tactics.
There is one critical point in which leaders sometimes stumble and from which it is often difficult to recover. It is the trip-wire that lies between the drama of rallying people to your side and the pragmatics …

So we all want Obama to rage. We all want him to make the passionate plea, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore.”
Somehow we all have these moments when we’d like to see our leaders raging passionately. Maybe not quite as wildly as Peter Finch in the 1976 movie Network, but maybe with the rage that Dylan Thomas demands of his dying father when he asks him to “Rage, rage …

In late September of 2008, in the aftermath of the Lehman Brothers collapse and the bailout bill finding tepid support amongst legislators; John McCain decided he needed to act. He suspended his campaign and rushed to Washington to broker a deal.
John Heilemann and Mark Halperin in their recent book, Game Change, argue that McCain’s actions might have over empathized his ability to construct a swift reconciliation with the Democrats and Republicans. They write,  “McCain’s instinct …

“Coalition” is a word that brings with it mixed reactions. Among academicians, there has been some wonderful work done on coalition theory.  In the world of practice, coalitions are often seen as a necessary political tool to achieve particular ends.  Leaders pushing agendas treat coalitions as nuisances they need to put up with rather than a mechanism to establish a cooperative enterprise. Successful coalitions are put in place before the fact. They are part and …

This evening I will be hosting a dinner workshop with Gary Bettman, commissioner of the National Hockey League, and Rob Manfred, Senior VP for HR for Major League Baseball. The topic of the evening is “Human Resource Practices and Industrial Relations in Professional Sports.” The Colloquium Series, held at the Cornell Club in Manhattan, brings together academics, practitioners, students, and policy leaders for dinner and discussion.
In Fall 2009 we had the honor of hosting a …