AskTheManager.com

Leadership Lessons from Cash for Clunkers
 
Without diving too deeply into a mini controversy from last week, let me just enlighten you with some quick facts:

Edmunds.com estimated that the recent Cash for Clunkers program cost US taxpayers about $24,000 per incremental vehicle sold;

The chief economist of the National Automobile Dealers Association (NADA) responded that the cost [...]

Tags: Leadership Advice, leadership news and views, leadership observations

Cash for Clunkers: What we can learn about Leadership from Bureaucrats?

Whether you agree or disagree that the US Government should be in the business of incentivizing the populace to buy new cars, the fact is that the so-called “cash for clunkers” program simply demonstrates that our government, like all governments, does not employ [...]

Tags: leadership news and views, leadership observations, typical manager

What Business Leaders Can Learn from Obama’s Bad Week

Wow, what a week for the Leader of the Free World. Just as his something-for-nothing-health-care-plan was starting to lose steam on Capitol Hill, one of his friends breaks into his own home, gets lippy with a cop and gets arrested.

In his typical “you never [...]

Tags: Digression, Leadership Advice, leadership news and views, Management Training

Quitters Never Win and Winners Never Quit
Argh! I can hear my mother misquoting Vince Lombardi in my sleep: “Quitters never win, and winners never quit.” A simple saying that forced me to keep my word throughout my life – even when it cost me money.
Why is it these simple clichés can hold such importance [...]

Tags: Digression, leadership news and views, leadership observations, leadership traits, Management Blogs

Leadership Lessons from the Public Sector
There are reasons some people are lifelong public servants and others work in the real world. Whether it’s the military, public education, a state legislature or a municipal government: a job void of profit responsibility is generally void of any true accountability. Without accountability, leadership can become unnecessary and [...]

Tags: leadership news and views, leadership observations, Leadership Situations

 
Lessons on Leadership and Humanity from Arne Duncan
 
As we wrote last month in our post about local school administrators: “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach. Those who can’t teach, become administrators.” Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is the administrator of all administrators.
 
On Tuesday, Secretary Duncan was in Denver proclaiming that American children [...]

Tags: Digression, Leadership, leadership news and views

Best of the Leadership Development Blogs
Whenever we’re unsure about whether we’re including too much leadership development and not enough general business fun and digression on AskTheManager.com, we develop the latest Leadership Development Blogwatch and realize that the blogosphere is so filled with junk science, juvenile opinions and professional hucksters that we should almost be [...]

Tags: leadership news and views, Leadership Weblog

 
The Stimulus, Obama and Leadership
Eight Hundred Billion Dollars. $800,000,000,000.00. That’s a lot of money. When combined with the $700,000,000,000.00 squandered by or scheduled to be squandered by the Troubled Asset Relief Project (TARP), we’re talking about one and a half trillion dollars. In round numbers, $1.5 trillion looks like this: $1,500,000,000,000.00.
Hard to fathom, really. To [...]

Tags: Digression, leadership news and views, leadership observations