Traditional organizations are arguably built like a phalanx, with disciplined ranks and interlocked functions
Cultural historian Theodore Roszak claimed that the deepest threat to human freedom was not any particular government or corporation.
The “garrison state” is a political term introduced eight decades ago that continues to shape descriptions in policy debates, empirical research, and popular discourse of possible future societal and economic development.
n the platform era, leadership is increasingly defined by visibility rather than judgment. This essay examines how evaluative systems reshape what leadership looks like—and what it requires.
Digital platforms no longer just distribute leadership ideas. They reshape how leadership is performed, perceived, and practiced in the AI-driven platform era.
A critical reflection on the rise of leadership listicles and why simplified, numbered advice may weaken serious leadership thinking and development.
The Algorithmic Tyranny of the Aspirational Average Leader [...]
I’m a great admirer of Emergent Futures Lab and regularly read their insightful posts and other content (you can sign up for their weekly newsletter here). Volume 193 of their newsletter challenges the dominant ‘Heroic Model of Creativity’ that shapes much Western creative practice.
Time Addiction: A Hidden Paradox Undermining Creative Leadership [...]
I spent the first three days of this week in Berlin facilitating a seminar focused on building individual reflective practices. As always, the opportunity to work with global creative leaders was inspiring...
The promise that AI will automatically and democratically boost everyone’s creative work isn’t automatically true, according to rigorous research from USC, Temple University, and Sichuan University scholars.
Scott Taylor and his Babson College colleagues differentiate entrepreneurial leadership from traditional leadership by revealing its psychophysiological foundations. Their research shows that entrepreneurial leaders...
Eleanor Wiske Dillon and her Microsoft Research colleagues’ six-month study of 6,000 workers across 56 companies shows that while AI tools can swiftly boost individual productivity – saving users up to three hours a week on email – real transformation demands organizational evolution.
Zombies have repeatedly shuffled through the cultural imagination of recent decades, in a surplus of books, films, video games and television series. As scholars from across disciplines have noted...
In today’s VUCA environment, the ‘silent killers’ framework still proves that the real enemy of strategic execution isn’t incompetence – it is often silence.
The following piece picks up on a previous Creative Leadership Hub article, “The Undead in the Executive Suite: Zombie and Vampire Leadership Today” – which itself extended the ideas in a research article by S. Alexander Haslam and his colleagues (2024).
In a live session earlier this week in Paris with Karen Harris, MD of Bain & Company’s Macro-Trends Group, what was to have been an overview of current global economic trends became a focused presentation and discussion of U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs.
The Undead in the Executive Suite: Zombie and Vampire [...]
Earlier this week I attended a reception with Anne-Laure Le Cunff, whose Tiny Experiments offers a refreshing alternative to traditional goal-setting frameworks. Le Cunff, a Franco-Algerian neuroscientist and entrepreneur based in London, details how abandoning linear thinking enabled her to rediscover curiosity and construct a more adaptive path.
In 1985, media scholar Neil Postman warned that television was turning all discourse into entertainment in his seminal work Amusing Ourselves to Death. Five years later, he identified a different threat in the proliferation of computer technology: information overload, or what he termed "informing ourselves to death."
With AI technologies driving rapid change in our ways of living, working, and leading, the newsletter will include a regular column that addresses major developments, promising, instructive, or inspiring practices, or other items of interest to creative leaders.
Thomas C. Schelling’s The Strategy of Conflict (1960) help explains why disruption is viewed and tolerated differently in business versus political/institutional contexts through a few key principles, illustrated by game theory and coordination problems.
The “Cybernetic Teammate” study by Harvard and Wharton researchers with Procter & Gamble reveals how generative AI fundamentally transforms teamwork.
Self-reflection serves as a cornerstone of meaningful and effective leadership, yet as business psychology researchers Kross, Ong, and Ayduk demonstrate, it’s a double-edged sword.
Last week, I published an article on the Creative Leadership Hub on LinkedIn that contained over 5000 words. The next day, I read a seemingly reputable set of recommendations for posting on LinkedIn...
Challenging the superficial understanding of network weaving as a relationship-building soft skill, experience designer and systems thinking expert Adrian Röbke outlines weaving’s deep function as the connective tissue holding adaptable ecosystems of change together and allowing complex challenges to be addressed.
The landscape of creative leadership continues to undergo profound transformation in the era of algorithmic platforms, social media, AI-enhanced tools, and decentralized digital spaces.
Nearly eight decades ago, Canadian political economist Harold Innis gave a lecture in which he sketched a revolutionary framework for understanding media's impact on civilization, distinguishing between ‘time-biased’ (durable but immobile) and ‘spacebiased’ (portable but ephemeral) communication technologies.
Today’s leaders and organizations confront a post-creative leadership landscape where traditional paradigms show clear limitations, yet new models remain emergent and uncertain. Recent structural shifts...
Offering the critical insight that in organizational learning, no one-size-fits-all, INSEAD’s Gianpiero Petriglieri identifies three distinct leadership archetypes that drive learning effectively. ‘Custodians’ create structured boot camps focused on alignment and standardization, ideal for companies undergoing strategic shifts.
In Rethinking Work, former Publicis CGO and long-time creative industry thought leader Rishad Tobaccowala identifies five interconnected forces remaking the world of work: generational shifts as Gen Z enters the workforce,
Creative leadership emerged in the post-World War II era as a reimagining of organizational and economic possibility and, in the context of the Cold War, an exemplar of U.S. and Western European cultural and Capitalist potential.
The emergence of digital, social, algorithmic, and AI-automated and augmented platforms – from Facebook's 2004 launch and Amazon's 2006 cloud services debut, through Instagram's 2010 mobile-first approach and TikTok's 2016 emergence,
How do innovative ventures succeed in established fields resistant to change? A fascinating study from two Stanford scholars – one of mission-driven entrepreneurship and international relations (Volmar), and the other of strategy and innovation in organizations (Eisenhardt) – examines two EdTech startups that took radically different approaches to disrupting higher education.
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Innovation thrives in the unknown. Discussing his new book, Uncertainty and Enterprise: Venturing Beyond the Known, Columbia professor Amar Bhidé makes a compelling case for embracing uncertainty rather than trying to eliminate it through statistical models.
In the 1970s, Terry Borton introduced a simple but effective reflective model. Borton was an English educational theorist, group facilitator, and performer – he gave ‘magic lantern’ shows.
The ‘Smart-Talk Trap,’ as outlined by Jeffrey Pfeffer and Robert I. Sutton in their seminal 1999 Harvard Business Review article, warns about the dangers of equating the ability...
At a Media Summit in Paris this week, the plans repeated by several of Europe’s most respected and influential journalistic and media brands involved extending their reach across new publications, channels, and specialized products.
The longtime University of Michigan Ross School professor has, with a collaborator, Chester Elton, looked beyond conventional tools and audits to pose one simple question about leadership: How often does someone leave an interaction with this leader feeling better (or worse) about themselves?
The longtime Stanford GSB professor has written three books about power that argue how, particularly in the world of management and work, leaders should act on things as they are rather than as they naively wish they were.
Popular perceptions of leadership in much of the world today are fraught with dissonance. An August 2024 Gallup poll revealed that only 20% of employees trust their organizational leadership.
The VIA Institute on Character has grown out of the Positive Psychology sub-field of psychological research. It focuses on character strengths (and their foundational virtues) as bases for deeper self-understanding, growth, and fulfillment.
While vital to our understanding of learning and growth, “mindsets” are increasingly made to serve as elastic and abstract catch-all’s for discussions about how to drive the change and improvement of individuals and groups.
Change is everywhere. Change is continuous. Change is accelerating and growing more complex. For leaders, such insistent reminders of the change around us and within...
If leadership can be re-cast “as a creative act” for which both leaders and followers partake in lifelong learning, as Harvard’s Barbara Kellerman proposes in The End of Leadership...
