by Jonathan Gifford | Mar 30, 2011 | Business & Leadership
In an earlier blog Greg Dyke and John Birt: lessons in leadership I explored the dramatic difference in leadership style between two previous Director Generals of the BBC: John Birt, and his successor, Greg Dyke. I used this case history recently in a morning...
by Jonathan Gifford | Mar 19, 2011 | Leaders from History
One of the defining aspects of leadership is courage: having the bravery not only to stand up and ask people to follow but also to put one’s head over the parapet. Napoleon Bonaparte – the successful young general who emerged unexpectedly as...
by Jonathan Gifford | Feb 7, 2011 | Business & Leadership
In my blog ‘Gerstner and the IBM turnaround: vision or execution’, I wrote about the life-threatening hole that IBM had got itself into by the early 1990s, before Louis Gerstner was persuaded to take up one of the most challenging Chief Executive roles in the...
by Jonathan Gifford | Jan 16, 2011 | Culture
have always been viewed with suspicion or dislike: we have an ambivalent attitude to the people who control access to the capital we need in order to make our business dreams a reality.But some of history’s great banking families—the medieval Italian Medici family,...
by Jonathan Gifford | Jan 10, 2011 | Leadership Ideas
People still talk about ‘the masks of leadership’—about a leader’s need to present different ‘faces’ to different audiences. Forget it. People see straight through people who are not being honest with them; they know when they are being manipulated. And people...
