The Leadership Professor

Here’s a professional effectiveness tip I can really embrace. Sleep – with a clear directive to my cortex before I nod off to coordinate with my hippocampus while I peacefully slumber. Let me explain. Research has long confirmed the vital role of sleep in mental functioning. Sleep is the time when the mind moves short-term [...]

The merits of joy have been promoted in this blog [see past posts of raising your joy quotient]. I am  pleased to announce that joy has reached the hallowed halls of our top business schools. Stanford Business School Marketing Professor Jennifer Aaker was profiled in the March edition of Fast Company for her popular – [...]

I spent a day earlier this week reading and providing feedback to a colleague on a book manuscript dealing with leadership and spirituality issues. In the academic world, that’s what professors do for one another. It’s always a plus when we learn something important from the collegial support. The book basically asks readers to think [...]

The happenings in the Middle East say much about the power of social media technologies. They are revolutionizing the practice of leadership. Followers need a simple cell phone to organize a groundswell in support or opposition to any leader, product, or cause. Huge crowds can be assembled with a simple text message and that powerful [...]

In his first prison interview, Bernie Madoff dropped a bomb. He was sure a number of banks and hedge funds were “complicit” in his fraud – “willfully blind” to the discrepancies in the information available to them and living a version of I’m not going to ask and please don’t tell. Madoff’s admission to the [...]

The film Black Swan has created quite a buzz. In it, Natalie Portman’s character, Nina, secures the role of her dreams – the lead in Swan Lake – only to be destroyed by the pressures that accompany doing it well. There’s an important leadership lesson in that. We can only lead well and strongly when [...]

Happy Valentine’s Day. Today is the perfect day to reflect on an important leadership truth. Leadership is all about love. It’s about devotion to a cause or an organization and the deep desire to contribute in important ways. It’s about the satisfaction from true partnership and recognition that there is power and possibility in joining [...]

The resignation of former President Hosni Mubarak in Egypt brings home powerful understandings about the interactive nature of leadership. All who aspire to lead from either the head or the foot of the table can learn something important about power, influence, and authority. Leadership is all about relationships, and it is followers – not leaders [...]

Leaders need to understand their world in order to influence it.  This requires sharp sense-making skills.  Sense-making on the surface seems like a cinch: you notice something, decide what to make of it, and determine what to do about it. Humans are pretty fast at this, and therein lies the problem. We tend to overlook [...]

My leadership blog has really taken root – and many thanks to those who now follow. I’d love to hear your comments and topics of interest.  Leave a comment after a post or email me your thoughts.   My posts will still be available through my website (www.joangallos.com), but you can now access them directly in [...]