These are some short pieces I have come across over the years that hew closely to my own outlook. If you find these resonating with you, we may be like-minded and a good fit for one another:

 

• Harvard Business Review: “It’s Time to Define Your Company’s Principles”
  
  Key points that were thought-provoking for me:

  • Principles are a tool to guide the behavior of individuals in accordance with an organization's vision and strategy. They are useful in informing choices between competing priorities or alternative courses of action. 

  • In a mature corporate culture with well-understood principles, decision-making can be delegated further down the org chart, creating a company with employees who are empowered and creating value bottom-up (vs. a company of half-hearted order-takers).

  • The most effective principles are ones that are distinctive to the company. Articulating this in turn requires having a perspective on what makes the company unique amongst its competitors in the first place.
     

• Harvard Business Review: “What Leaders Really Do”
  
  Key points that were thought-provoking for me:

  • Management deals with complexity. Leadership deals with change.

  • Both are critical; however, most organizations are overmanaged and underled.

  • The distinction is helpful because it illuminates issues that arise when management tools are used for leadership purposes or vice versa. For example, planning and budgeting are management tools to support near-term predictability and coordination. Visioning and strategic alignment are leadership exercises to set direction in the face of uncertainty. Often, these are collapsed into the same annual process - creating ineffective management and leadership.
     

• McKinsey & Company: Voices of CEO Excellence Podcast - Merck’s Ken Frazier
  
  Key points that were thought-provoking for me:

  • “A bunch of talented people working together will not necessarily like each other. By the time people get to a certain career stage, they are set in their ways. One of the biggest challenges for a CEO is to assemble a team of talented individuals and then create an environment in which they work together effectively.”

  • “The only way a global company like Merck can be run effectively is for the CEO to delegate power…In the org chart, who was the farthest person from the customer? Me. Who was the farthest person from the manufacturing line? Me. Who was the farthest person from the research bench? Me. So why should I be making decisions when I am not the person best equipped to make those decisions? The CEO’s job is to be a compass, not a GPS.”