Postcards
Power Point: Get in front of change
March 24, 2009: 6:36 PM ET"One cannot manage change. One can only be ahead of it...In a period of upheavals, such as the one we are living in, change is the norm. To be sure, it is painful and risky, and above all it requires a great deal of very hard work. But unless it is seen as the task of the organization to lead change, the organization...will not survive."
-- Legendary management guru Peter Drucker from his book, Management Challenges for the 21st Century. Drucker passed away in 2005, but his lessons continue to guide Procter & Gamble (PG) CEO A.G. Lafley, as Pattie mentions in her post today on how the best bosses find focus.
Lafley references this passage from Drucker in his article, "What only the CEO can do," in the May Harvard Business Review. "The outside changes inevitably, sometimes very fast, and often unpredictably," writes Lafley. It's the job of the CEO, he says, to connect external dynamics with what's happening inside the company. --Jessica Shambora
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This week: California on the edge
I was in California this past week and I'm happy to report that the Golden State did not fall into the Pacific Ocean.
It seemed it might, as inches of rain drenched Silicon Valley and the state government fought off insolvency. What a disaster California is right now, even after the legislature yesterday approved a plan to close a $42 billion budget deficit and end the "fiscal emergency" that the action-hero MORE
Patricia Sellers - Feb 20, 2009 1:51 PM ETPosted in: Apple, Arnold Schwarzenegger, auto industry, banks, California, CEOs, Cisco, Citigroup, Doris Drucker, economy, Facebook, finance, General Motors, Geoff Colvin, Hewlett-Packard, management, MBA, Oracle, Peter Drucker, politics, Postcards, Silicon Valley, technology, unemployment, Washington -
Power Point: Companies don't stumble; people do
"The companies acquired the usual encumbrances of success--among them arrogance and bureaucracy--and they devised new ways to fail as well. Or, precisely, their executives did. Companies don't stumble; people do. As Peter Drucker has said: 'Every failure is a failure of a manager.'"
-- Carol Loomis, Fortune senior editor at large, wrote this in a legendary 1993 cover story, "Dinosaurs?," about General Motors (GM), Sears (SHLD), and IBM (IBM). The article MORE
Patricia Sellers - Jul 3, 2008 2:26 PM ETPosted in: auto industry, Carol Loomis, CEOs, Eddie Lampert, Failure, General Motors, GM, IBM, Leadership by Geoff Colvin, management, Peter Drucker, Postcards, Power Point, Power Shift, Sears, Success
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In her first public interview since taking on the CEO gig at Yahoo, Marissa Mayer outlines her priorities both in and out of the company. Watch
Brenda Barnes famously quit a big job to be with her kids. Years later, a massive stroke nearly killed her--and her daughter returned the favor. Watch
Fortune senior editor at large Pattie Sellers has written some of Fortune's most talked-about cover stories, including "Marissa Mayer: Ready to Rumble at Yahoo," "Oprah's Next Act," "Can Meg Whitman Save California?" "The $100 Billion Woman" (Melinda Gates), and "Remodeling Martha" (Martha Stewart). She has helped oversee Fortune's "Most Powerful Women in Business" package every year since its launch in 1998. Pattie is Executive Director of the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit, the preeminent gathering of women leaders in business and beyond. She oversees MPW programs that enable women leaders to extend their influence and empower the next generation—such as Fortune MPW Entrepreneurs and the Fortune-U.S. State Department Global Women Leaders Mentoring Partnership. Beyond her Fortune duties, she is also developing Live Content across Time Inc. Pattie grew up in Allentown, PA, graduated from the University of Virginia, and started at Fortune in 1984. Her blog, Postcards, is about how power players lead, manage others, and navigate their careers.
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The Fortune/U.S. State Department Global Women Leaders Mentoring Partnership brings rising-star women from countries around the world to the U.S. for three-week mentorships with participants of the annual Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit - among them Ursula Burns of Xerox, Laura Lang of Time Inc., Marissa Mayer of Yahoo, and Tory Burch.
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