Everyday Leaders

For years business writers and speakers have focused on larger than life, charismatic Leaders, with a capital “L”. The implication is that the success of an organization is dependent on this one person and his or her ability to inspire everyone else to follow a unique vision. This focus on the Leader is at least a partial cause of the lack of trust we are witnessing in business organizations today. Leaders believe they must behave in some larger than life way. With the expectation that they must see things the rest of us do not, they make riskier and riskier decisions, desperate to prove they deserve the role. Perhaps now that we have seen the problems resulting from this Leader-focused approach to running our organizations, we can return to a more reasonable approach - one that is actually attainable by mere mortals - where many are called upon to be good, competent, everyday leaders. If educational institutions begin to focus on developing the skills and character of these everyday leaders, our organizations will not only be more successful, but surely more trusted than they are today

When Good Management Isnt Enough: The Story Of A Czech Business In The Twentieth Century

We teach management as a rational process: if you conscientiously apply the concepts learned, you will succeed.  However, for this equation to work certain underlying factors must be in place.  No matter how well prepared managers may be, events unfold around them that profoundly affect their organizations.  We may take the basic infrastructure of democratic capitalism for granted when we teach management education, but it doesn’t hurt to remind our students occasionally that these ‘givens’ aren’t always there.  By teaching our students to appreciate how remarkable is the achievement of democratic capitalism, will we be more likely to protect it and perhaps even improve upon it

Entrepreneurial Attitudes Of MBA Students In The United States Relative To The CIS: The Case Of Armenia

This paper compares the entrepreneurial attributes of MBA students in Armenia to those in the United States.  If entrepreneurial attributes are more learned cultural behaviors and not only inherent personality factors, business students in a recently-privatized economy such as Armenia would not score as high on an entrepreneurial personality index as would business students in the U.S. where both models of entrepreneurship and expectations of certain proactive characteristics in individuals entering the business world are widespread