I have been having an email conversation with my friend Andrew, a Chief Executive who is leading and managing his very large business through complex and challenging change. It was not surprising to hear that initially, things were progressing at a slower pace than he would have liked. (Rather important as CEOs tend to get sacked for lack of execution rather than just failing to have appropriate goals).

As a leader Andrew is effective and l am confident that under his wise leadership his organisation will achieve useful changes. Vision wise, he is focused on the periphery and the core rather than just being narrowly focused on current performance. And, in strategy-making he is not rigid, making static investments. Rather, he is inquisitive and oriented towards options. In short, he practices vigilant leadership.

As Day and Schoemaker observe in their excellent book Peripheral Vision, non-vigilant organisation leaders are preoccupied with: (i) ensuring a culture which is rigid and conformist;   (ii) configuring the organisation such that it is inward looking, and (iii) in terms of knowledge sharing, the focus is on tracking pre-selected business data to the neglect of gathering and sharing weak signals.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 6th, 2006 at 6:13 pm and is filed under Book reviews, Leadership, Purpose and Vision. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.