Postcards

Power Point: Get in front of change

"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 MORE

How the best bosses find focus

"The hardest thing about the job is staying focused," President Obama told Steve Kroft on 60 Minutes Sunday night.

Are you feeling like the President these days? Unfocused? Maybe fatally so? We're living in an age of "global A.D.D.," as David Brooks, the New York Times op-ed writer said in his column last Friday. Brooks criticizes President Obama for attempting to tackle the "four most complicated problems facing the nation--health care, MORE

It's time to reinvent

Tech companies are rethinking their identities. IBM may buy Sun Microsystems. Cisco (CSCO) is moving into the server market, and also mightily into the consumer space. The latest move by Cisco CEO John Chambers--whose family reportedly owns eight Flip cameras--is a buyout of Pure Digital Technologies, which sells those ultra-simple videocameras. (I love mine.)

Powerful people are busy rethinking their identities too. My  last two stories in Fortune are about ex-CEOs MORE

Why P&G's president quit

by Patricia Sellers

Procter & Gamble (PG) lost its president today: Susan Arnold, a 29-year veteran who drove the company's high-margin beauty business to $20 billion in sales and went on to oversee all of P&G's brands, stepped down one day after her 55th birthday.

"My dad retired at 62," Arnold said, phoning this afternoon on her way to a Walt Disney (DIS) board meeting. "Then he got really sick. You know MORE

Most Admired Companies know their values

by Jessica Shambora

For Fortune's Most Admired Companies issue, released this week, I interviewed the CEOs of two top performers: Bill Weldon at Johnson & Johnson (No. 5 on the list) and Jim Skinner at McDonald's (No. 16). Fortune ranks companies based on survey results from more than 4,000 executives, directors and securities analysts.

My interviews with these chiefs covered a range of topics, from cosmetic surgery to the Dollar Menu. But MORE

Reinvent your firm, not your values

Reinvent!

Every manager is supposed be doing that these days. You know, there's a lot more risk in reinvention than just the uncertainty of your fancy new business model. In your rush to reinvent, you could well leave your core values behind.

I've been contemplating this lately for several reasons. For one, I'm sold on the wisdom of Jim Collins, the management guru who was part of a recent Fortune cover package MORE

Power Point: Values are key to survival

"The more challenged you are, the more you have to have your values."

-- Jim Collins, management guru and author of Built to Last and Good to Great, in a Q&A in the current issue of Fortune. As he notes, companies like Procter & Gamble (PG), General Electric (GE), Johnson & Johnson (JNJ), and IBM (IBM) have an incredible fabric of values--underlying ideals that explain why the companies exist. Even more MORE

Guest Post: How to survive the storm

by Nancy Koehn, Professor, Harvard Business School

Are you in the center of the storm?

I teach business history and leadership at Harvard Business School and have been fascinated lately by the notion of powerful people getting a grip by stepping back and letting go.

The idea is counter-intuitive. But it works, particularly in today's environment of great turmoil and uncertainty. Seeing the forest for the trees is critical. Consider these lessons in MORE

CEOs step up to a higher calling

Is the role of the Fortune 500 CEO changing? I think it is. Of course, we've never seen so many corporate chiefs gain fame by testifying in the halls of Congress -- and then get skewered on Saturday Night Live. Any leader's nightmare, indeed. But as the world spins out of control, even the admired CEOs (a rare breed!) are feeling a need to step up and broaden their traditional MORE

Marketers strive for value

Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain compares this economic crisis to the one that triggered the Great Depression: Look back to the 1929 period "to see the kind of slowdown we're experiencing now," said Thain -- who sold his firm to Bank of America (BAC) -- at a conference yesterday. Thain's outlook is scary--and marketers are getting his message. Have you noticed how some of the big-brand companies are adjusting to MORE