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Cross-Cultural Leadership: How to Create People Alignment (Part 3)

This series is about people alignment as a crucial competence for today’s leaders. Especially in a globalized world, where cross-cultural and multinational challenges are becoming more and more a normal part of the leader’s job. Successful leaders create people alignment…

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Cross-Cultural Leadership: How to Create People Alignment (Part 1)

Green globe baloons

Today’s and tomorrow’s leaders are more and more facing cross-cultural challenges caused by globalization, emerging economies and new markets. How to notice differences in cultures? How to understand their impact on people behavior and performance? How to avoid cross-cultural friction…

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Leading Innovation: Why Executives Should Stimulate People to Make (Better) Mistakes

Innovation

A while ago I was working with a senior executive team. The team was leading a global division and was facing a complex change that involved four continents. They organized a session together to align as a team on the…

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Cross-Cultural Leadership: How Misinterpretations of Dishonesty Can Destroy Team Alignment

Sun Flower with the word Honesty

When leading change, for instance in post merger integrations, leadership teams are very often confronted with cross-cultural differences. These can be corporate or national culture differences. Not dealing with these cultural differences effectively can have a serious impact on leadership…

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Leading Change: Three Major Misconceptions That Hinder Innovation

Road sign with the word Innovation on it

These days almost every organization is discussing the need for innovation. There is no CEO that talks with me about the company’s strategic drivers without mentioning ‘building more innovation power’. Every government is claiming innovation to be one of its…

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Leading Change: How Great Leaders Deal with Criticism

Barometer

We live in times of change. Shifting powers between West and East, technological evolutions, emerging countries and changing economic landscapes, financial systems that are under severe pressure, new innovative companies that change market places. As I described in an earlier…

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Post Merger Integration: Cultural Alignment is a Prerequisite for Value Creation

LeadershipWatch Aad Boot

Post Merger Integration research over the past decades has shown that a great deal of mergers and acquisitions did not yield the desired value. Many surveys mention insufficient attention to the people and cultural aspects of the integration as one of the main causes of failure. Overlooking or underestimating the effect of cultural differences can seriously hinder the integration process and can destroy value. Read more …

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Leading Change in the 21st Century: The Power of Letting Go

Painting of apples

The story goes that the hunters put an apple in a glass jar with a narrow opening and leave the jar deep into the jungle under a tree. In the evening the monkeys come out of the trees triggered by…

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Leading Change: Breaking Through the Fear of Mistakes

The word fear ingraved in a white background

“The team is already four months involved in this change process. They are informed in detail about the reasons for the change and the objectives that were set by the executive board. The phase of ‘not knowing’ or ‘not understanding’…

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Leading Change: What does Change mean to You?

You find two kinds of leaders, those who lead change as a continuous learning and improvement experience versus those who do not … yet. And their mental models are reflected in the successes people achieve. Read more …

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