10 Building Blocks for Today’s Leadership

10 Building Blocks for Today’s Leadership

Establishing Leadership: Always Stay Accountable

Virgin Group’s Richard Branson readily takes responsibility for failures like Virgin Digital; it comes with the territory of taking business risks.

Building Trust: Convey Solid Principles

Legendary UCLA basketball coach John Wooden inspired stars ranging from the introspective Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to the offbeat Bill Walton by promoting and practicing values such as loyalty, initiative, poise, friendship and teamwork.

Setting Strategy: Keep Moving—and Shake Things Up

A software and services provider for the insurance industry, Insurity shifts its staffing model as new projects and initiatives are added to its solutions portfolio.

Engaging Staff: Raise Visibility

Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, stay highly accessible to all employees for questions and feedback, whether in the main campus cafeteria or the company’s weekly all-hands meeting.

Managing Projects: Keep Your Eye on the Prize

Marriott streamlined its abundant, far-flung hotel project portfolio through a unified approach to planning and managing. It now shelves projects that don’t sufficiently align with the company’s overall business strategies.

Renovating Business: Assemble the Right Team

Cummins increased its ability to address customer calls by 40 percent by setting up response teams led by proven experts in the company’s businesses, technologies such as CRM, and process redesign.

Aligning Technology: Consolidate Today. Save Tomorrow

Fujitsu invested in a massive, shared IT infrastructure to support recently merged operations in the U.K. and Ireland. The result is a 20% reduction in hosting costs while increasing server utilization from 10% to 70% on average, saving significant energy costs.

Transforming Staff: Make Incentives Meaningful

Beam Inc., the manufacturer of spirit brands such as Jim Beam and Maker’s Mark, has developed a new salary system that rewards employees for their ability to collaborate upon, take ownership of, and align with core strategies.

Renewing Communications: Elevate Social Standing

With 78% of employees saying they want to work for a “social” CEO, GoDaddy’s Bob Parsons uses his blog as a platform to discuss topics ranging from personal freedom to global issues to Internet governance.

Reimagining the Organization: Drive toward Impact-Makers

Valve Corp., an entertainment software and tech company, awards raises according to where employees “rank” each other in terms of who creates the most value for the company. (And, yes, employees are not allowed to vote for themselves.)