Despite Steven Covey's declaration that "charisma is dead," managers constantly seek charisma because of its ability to generate exceptional performance. This is why charisma-related leadership theories are so highly regarded among the 70+ leadership theories.
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 [...]
Time Addiction: A Hidden Paradox Undermining Creative Leadership [...]
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...
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).
The Undead in the Executive Suite: Zombie and Vampire [...]
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.
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...
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.
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...
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,
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...
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.
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...
