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‘Micro grid option of power generation best’

http://thenationonlineng.net/micro-grid-option-of-power-generation-best-2/

Second in Command: The Misunderstood Role of the Chief Operating Officer

When Larry Ellison, founder and CEO of Oracle, and his chief operating officer, Ray Lane, parted ways in 2000, the event inspired the kind of breathless reporting usually reserved for celebrity divorces. Forbes.com reporter David Einstein wondered in print, “Did Lane quit or was he fired?” and wished he had “a clue as to why Ellison’s second banana for the past eight years suddenly was cleaning…

Senior managers are paid to make tough decisions. Much rides on the outcome of those decisions, and executives are judged—quite rightly—on their overall success rate. It’s impossible to eliminate risk from strategic decision making, of course. But we believe that it is possible for executives—and companies—to significantly improve their chances of success by making one straightforward (albeit not…

 “That’s enough of me talking about myself – let’s hear you talk about me!”

― Anonymous narcissist

“It’s not easy being superior to everyone I know!”

― Anonymous narcissist

Psychologist Stephen Johnson writes that the narcissist is someone who has “buried his true self-expression in response to early injuries and replaced it with a highly developed, compensatory false self.” This alternate…

Most people have heard the line “Power corrupts.” (Or the longer version, “Absolute power corrupts absolutely.”. The question I’m often asked is “why and how does power corrupt leaders?”

The answer is complex, but fairly clear. Leadership, at its core, is all about power and influence. Leaders use their power to get things done. A simple distinction is between two forms of power. Socialized power…

Some leaders are clearly narcissists. Is narcissism good, bad, or neutral?

When we watch mean-spirited, mudslinging politics in national elections (or even at the local level), we may wonder, “What kind of person would subject himself or herself to such, criticism, scrutiny, and still be able to give as good as he or she takes?” Certainly it takes someone with a substantial ego. We are also…

What does it take to spark your creativity? For Doug Dietz, the executive behind GE Healthcare’s magnetic resonance-imaging (MRI) equipment, it was seeing a little girl cry.

He remembers the day vividly. He’d come to a hospital to see one of his machines in action and was initially pleased. The scanner looked beautiful and was functioning well; the technician on duty had no complaints. But just…

Interview  with contributor Don Sull, who teaches strategy at MIT and the London Business School, about the tension between scholars who put sustainable competitive advantage at the center of strategy and those who argue that some industries are changing too quickly to allow for sustained performance. Here’s our edited conversation:

Who’s right — the “sustainable advantage” traditionalists or the…

Tech start-up Haystackhas developed an innovative – and controversial — solution to the stressful challenge of finding an open parking meter in congested areas. This smartphone app allows those leaving a parking space to alert other Haystack users in the area of their “about-to-be” open spot. To secure this meter (i.e., have the parked car driver wait until they arrive), users pay a fee of $3…

We are reaching the end of the first stage of our work supporting Wikimedia’s strategy development process (check out the progress at http://strategy.wikimedia.org) and I hit my first soul-searching moment. The catalyst? An email from Wikimedia strategy project manager Eugene Kim a couple of weeks back sharing his thoughts on how to think and act in a wiki way.

He shared three principles:

1.…

Why can’t employees speak honestly about their career goals with their managers? It’s because of the reasonable belief that doing so is risky and career-limiting if the employee’s aspirations do not perfectly match up with the manager’s existing views and time horizons. It seems safer to wait until another job offer is in hand, so that if one’s manager reacts badly to one’s ideas, there’s no…

Everybody hates it, but so much of life is ruled by it: bureaucracy. It’s time to bust up the ideology of control that has infiltrated every aspect of organizational life.

That’s why we launched the Beyond Bureaucracy Challenge. This is the second leg of the HBR/McKinsey M-Prize for Management Innovation and a call for inspiring stories, bold ideas, and instructive experiments that demonstrate…

Successful collaboration between stakeholders starts with what social psychologists call perspective taking: the ability to see the world through someone else’s eyes. How can leaders of organizations foster this crucial skill? New social science research, including my work with senior executives atFortune 500 companies, points to four tactics.

Soften your hard line.

For years Microsoft railed…

Mirror, mirror, on the wall — who’s the fairest of them all? That’s the question most economists are asking. Many answer China, a few holdouts contend: America. I’d like to tell you a very different story, that clashes with both orthodoxies. Economic might isn’t shifting. It’s evaporating. Welcome to the Age of Decline.

A new decade’s breaking, and in it, people, companies, and countries will…

Produce more! Make it better! Spend less!

If you’re a first or second line manager, these demands from upper management may sound familiar. And odds are, you are going to fail at accomplishing them — two-thirds of transformation efforts do. In fact, 8 out of 10 times I can predict if companies will be successful. But I’m not a fortuneteller; I just look and listen for two things: Are the…

The wisdom of learning from failure is incontrovertible. Yet organizations that do it well are extraordinarily rare. This gap is not due to a lack of commitment to learning. Managers in the vast majority of enterprises that I have studied over the past 20 years—pharmaceutical, financial services, product design, telecommunications, and construction companies; hospitals; and NASA’s space shuttle…