Global News

Sunday September 05, 2010

Actually these are highlights of the past two weeks. I gave myself a bit of a late August vacation last week and overlooked this responsibility, though Forbes Leadership kept sailing along with Susan Adams’s firm hand on the tiller. Now that it’s Labor Day weekend, I’m buckling down again.

During the week I skipped out, our best outside content included a piece by Miguel a. Quiñones, a professor at Southern Methodist University’s Cox School of Business, on “Getting More Hispanics To The top.” It examined why there are so few Hispanics in executive leadership positions in American corporations, why that lack is bad for the economy, what needs to be done about it, and what specifically the Cox School is already doing. we also had Pamela Meyer, a prevarication expert, on “How To Avoid being Lied To,” in which she laid out the basics of who around one is most likely to lie, how to prevent it from happening and, most usefully and interestingly, how to spot the main giveaway signs that someone isn’t telling the truth. It’s your compact handbook for spotting dishonesty before it hurts you.

Last week Shaun Rein gave us “three Big Trends Changing China For Multinationals,” a piece with valuable insight for absolutely anyone who does business in that country, and he followed up this week with “why Glenn Beck is a Great Communicator,” explaining why those who disagree with Beck’s politics are very, very wrong to simply dismiss him as a loudmouth or a demagogue or anything else they don’t have to take seriously. in fact, they can and should be learning from him. Daniel Isenberg, a management professor at Babson College, offered a wealth of counterintuitive wisdom with “Surprising Leadership Lessons from around The World,” drawing on his globe-spanning studies to give specific examples of how entrepreneurship isn’t about innovation, isn’t about risk-taking, isn’t about the pursuit of opportunity, isn’t about passion and isn’t good for your health. If only the last of those points doesn’t surprise you, read the piece right away, and prepare to be amused as well as enlightened.

We had a banner couple of weeks for career advice articles. Helen Coster gave her farewell before leaving on a two-month fellowship in Washington and Bolivia with the International Reporting Project (which she’s reporting on here) with a report, appropriately enough, on “How To take a Sabbatical from Work.” Susan Adams addressed a couple of reasons you might feel like taking a sabbatical in “Dealing With Offensive Remarks at Work” and “when you just Don’t Fit in at The Office.”

There was much more, too, over the past two weeks that you can find at Forbes Leadership. this week we’re especially looking forward to Wednesday evening, September 8, when we will launch a special report on Change Management, with a range of experts sharing their wisdom in a slew of articles on how to keep ahead of markets and competitors and technologies and even employees when they are shifting more rapidly and unpredictably and unceasingly than ever before. The Buddha observed two and a half thousand years ago that the only constant is change, and that is far more true than ever today. Business is about change more than anything else, and success is about staying on top of and ahead of change. Join us as we examine what that means for all of us and how we can all make the best of it.