#leadershipdevelopment

Anyone got some details? Actually liked him.

We at Fiserv are so grateful that the the empty suit, cowatd Mike Lyons has moved on. He destroyed the retirement accounts of so many people, was the master of vapid nonsense- coordinate, collaborate, execute- blah blah blah. No work ethic, lazy and entitled- good luck Truist

Hackett Pavilion 1 & 2. Are you kidding me? When nothing is named after Mulally, it shows you how insecure and id--tic leadership really is.

I just saw into CR on West Campus and low‑key freaked out. He used to be one of my favorite tech leaders before he moved into that executive role in sebcoe amd then left us for a big tech company. Do you think he might be coming back?

When Mr. Gerstner became CEO, IBM was facing one of the most challenging periods in its history. He made difficult decisions, refocused the company, preserved IBM as an integrated enterprise, and helped restore its competitiveness. His leadership demonstrated that successful executives must balance long-term strategy, financial discipline, innovation, and customer focus.

A Lou Gerstner Leadership Academy could teach future leaders about:

Leading through major organizational change.
Making tough decisions under pressure.
Putting customers first.
Driving accountability and execution.
Building a culture focused on long-term success rather than short-term popularity.

Whether someone agrees with every decision he made or not, Mr. Gerstner's turnaround of IBM remains one of the most significant corporate leadership stories of the modern era. There are valuable leadership lessons that today's and tomorrow's IBM leaders can still learn from his example.

So many shakeups among the leadership over the years and things keep getting worse. It's like we're incapable of bringing in or selecting people who are actually capable of leading.

KELLY AND BILL SHOULD STAR IN THE NEXT SEQUEL.

Mist leadership taking over and Aruba folks are leaving. What are y’ll thoughts?

https://www.reddit.com/r/JoeRogan/comments/1u7pzgl/leak_exposes_members_of_peter_thiels_secretive/

Wtaf!

I report to someone, but after they flattened the hierarchy and got rid of all the middle managers I ended up reporting directly to the director in my org.

He's not interested in or capable of leading a team. I never see him except during our monthly 1:1 (which is basically just a monthly recap so he can tell his boss what I do).

There's no leadership here at 3M anymore. Just a bunch of disinterested, self-important jagoffs having meetings because they didn't know what else to do. And nobody can get promoted, so it's never to change.

The problem isn’t just one bad decision. It’s weak direction, poor follow through, and leadership that doesn’t inspire much confidence. Does anybody actually still see a future here?

This is my favourite Wizard of Oz song.

It is about time for regime change.
18 months and all he does is fire people?
And not one positive thing came out in 18 months that he has been here
preaching positivity.

Anyone?

In most organizations, you will typically find two groups of people. Those that are desperate to lead and those that are not interested in leading. Most times, your best leaders are in the latter group. The question is, how do you convince the latter group to want to lead?

GPC finally fired not retired our supposed tech leader. He destroyed a great organization. Next they will move to take out all his minions.

DW in the first Your Growth Powers our Future” video: “I am very fortunate to have the career that I had with the company. I think early on, I was lucky in that senior managers took an interest in me and made sure and made sure that I got some of these experiences. “ (referring to a diverse set of roles across the org).
So admitting his career was built on luck and being deemed a hipo by senior management early on. If you’re lucky enough to be a chosen one early on, you’ve got it made. Perhaps you started with the right manager over you that was also a high flyer. Or you made a connection with someone by happenstance and they took a liking to you. Guess that’s life.

I really want to be a VP or SVP. I’m currently an L5 and just started a couple months ago. People are telling me to do a lot of GTKYs and that it can get pretty political. Is this true? Any advice?

New leadership will land soon finally

Any good leadership remaining? Who are they????

This latest request to fill out a form in preparation for a town hall at the branch level is a classic example of a "disconnect" in leadership. After two years of managing a team, a leader is expected to have moved beyond surface-level resumes and into an understanding of their team’s specific strengths, career aspirations, and personalities. When a manager asks for a bio this late in the game, it signals that the recognition might be performative and just a check box that she did it.
We now know we are just a set of bullet points and that she is more concerned with the optics of the meeting than the reality of our team’s work.

Story by Ruth Umoh

The path to the corner office has long followed a familiar pattern. Start at the bottom, learn the business from within, and advance step by step. That model is now changing, and artificial intelligence is the primary reason.

AI is rapidly absorbing the routine work that once defined early career roles. Data entry, basic financial analysis, customer support triage, and even junior coding are increasingly automated.

The result is a shrinking base of entry-level positions and rising expectations for those who remain. Graduates are being asked to demonstrate experience that they have fewer opportunities to acquire.

This is not only a labor market shift. It is a leadership shift.

Entry-level roles did more than fill operational needs. They functioned as an apprenticeship in how organizations actually work. They taught how decisions move through systems, where incentives distort behavior, how customers respond, and where risk accumulates. As those roles recede, so does the informal training ground that once produced experienced executives.

As a result, future CEOs will be shaped more deliberately than their predecessors. In conversations with several executive recruiters and HR bosses, they noted that companies are moving away from the assumption that leadership will emerge naturally through long tenure. Instead, they are beginning to identify potential earlier and develop it more intentionally. This takes the form of accelerated development tracks that emphasize strategic thinking, judgment under uncertainty, ethical reasoning, and the ability to manage human and machine systems together.

Future leaders will also begin their careers differently. Rather than spending years executing routine tasks, they will enter closer to the decision layer of the firm. They will supervise automated processes, interpret outputs, and make trade-offs about risk, capital, and values earlier than previous generations. Training will rely less on gradual exposure and more on structured rotations, scenario planning, and simulated decision environments.

At the same time, companies are widening the pool from which leaders are drawn. Entrepreneurs who have managed risk and capital firsthand, technical specialists who shape digital infrastructure, operators from sectors that are still developing frontline leadership, military veterans trained in high-consequence decision-making, and career switchers with transferable strategic skills are all becoming more common sources of executive talent.

None of this means companies are losing the ability to develop leaders. It does mean they are losing the luxury of doing so passively.

The future CEO is unlikely to follow a single standardized path. Some will rise internally through redesigned development models, while others will arrive from outside with experience formed elsewhere. But what’s clear is that the role of an organization will shift from producing leaders through long service to cultivating and integrating leadership capacity drawn from a broader and more varied set of experiences.

https://fortune.com/article/entry-level-jobs-disappear-ai-corporate-ladder-ceo/

The decision-makers at Mattel are stuck thinking one quarter at a time. There is no long-range vision, just constant reaction. It’s like they’re having trouble realizing that popular trends can last anywhere from a month to years and you can’t base a whole business strategy on just that. That lack of foresight is painful to watch.

Alan F is exiting BNY,he’s been with the firm for 18 years,when veterans leave it is always a bad signal..I sense something big is in store for 2026!

Friday afternoon brought the usual choreography. A polite email chain. A cake that looked like it came from the same vendor everyone uses when they want to appear thoughtful without actually being thoughtful. Handshakes, laughter that arrived a half second late, compliments delivered like obligations. Jennifer smiled the way people do when they are leaving a place they have already emotionally left behind months ago.

I remember thinking that the goodbyes were too smooth. Too clean. Like the floor had been swept already.

By Monday morning the layoffs started.

That is what made it feel cruel, not just business. The timing had the sharpness of intent. There was no breathing room between the farewell and the damage, no pause that might suggest humanity, only a clean cut that made it obvious someone had been waiting for the moment the gate swung open.

People talk about reorganizations as if they are weather. Something that happens above us. Something inevitable.

But this did not feel like weather. It felt like a decision.

Salim’s new structure was being sold as alignment, as simplification, as focus. The slogans were familiar. The language was polished. Yet the shape of it was unmistakable. Power was consolidating. Regional teams were being pulled into functions under Salim’s organization, a transfer presented as efficiency but experienced as control. In the hallways and in quiet chats between meetings, people didn’t call it a transition. They called it a takeover.

And the pattern of who benefited was obvious enough that it stopped being a rumor and started becoming something you could map.

The regional vice presidents were now clearly tied to Salim’s orbit. Soufiane ran Central West, and it was no secret that he and Salim were close. Not close in the way corporate leaders pretend to be close on stage. Close in the real way. Fifteen years of shared history, private conversations, vacations and dinners, familiarity so deep that it didn’t need to be explained. Their friendship did not stay outside the office. It lived in the room with them.

Bob ran Northeast South and had his own history with Salim, a relationship that had grown in Bellevue the way these things always grow. Proximity becoming trust, trust becoming access, access becoming protection. People called it networking. People who weren’t invited called it something else.

Under Salim’s umbrella, the functional leaders stood like pillars around him. Naveen led Field Engineering. Jon handled Field Operations and Resilience. Craig ran Customer and Stakeholder Engagement. Jeff drove Network Build Strategy and Execution. Pankaj owned Insights Enablement Strategy.

On paper it looked like a clean machine. In real life it felt like a court.

I had worked for Harlan for many years. Harlan was not a performer. He didn’t need a spotlight to be effective. He was one of those leaders who could walk into a problem and understand it from the inside out, not because he had read a summary but because he actually knew the work. He could speak in specifics and still respect the larger mission. He was demanding, sometimes exhausting, but his intelligence felt honest. It made you sharper. It made you better.

So when Harlan was replaced and Bob moved into the space he left behind, it hit me like a personal insult. Not because Bob was incompetent. Bob was fine. But fine was not the point. The point was that it didn’t feel earned. It felt selected.

It felt like the kind of choice that happens when the decision is already made before any interviews are scheduled. When the criteria is not performance or vision but belonging. Being inside the circle. Being the familiar face that doesn’t threaten the center.

That is what broke something in me. Not the change itself, but the reason underneath it.

Jeff was another kind of story. Jeff could talk. He had that smooth tone that made everything sound inevitable and exciting, like the future was a place he had already visited and you were lucky he came back to describe it. People laughed at his jokes even when they weren’t funny. People nodded while he spoke even when his points were thin. His confidence was persuasive, and that is what made him dangerous.

To me, Jeff lacked the ability to truly imagine the future of technology. He could repeat what was popular. He could package an idea. He could drive change with force. But too often the vetting was half cooked, the risks minimized, the unknowns waved away as if skepticism itself were a character flaw. He moved fast and demanded agreement, and when reality pushed back, the cost landed on everyone else.

Worse than that, he took disagreement personally.

If you challenged him, he didn’t argue like an engineer. He didn’t test the idea. He tested you. He smiled while he did it, as if he were being helpful, as if he admired your passion, and then he found quieter ways to punish you. Your name disappeared from a thread. Your project got reassigned. Your feedback became concerns about alignment. Your performance review suddenly included words like attitude and collaboration.

He didn’t have to raise his voice. He just had to decide you were inconvenient.

I remembered stories from Sprint, the ones people told when they thought nobody important could hear. How budgets were treated like personal allowances. Trips that were always justified as necessary. Dinners that were always framed as stakeholder building. Complaints delivered as if the organization existed to soothe him. And the constant sense that someone else would eventually be held responsible for whatever didn’t work.

Craig played a different game. Craig knew how to lean upward. He knew how to speak in the language leadership wanted to hear. He also knew how to keep his team in the shadows.

He didn’t protect them out of kindness. He protected them out of control. Visibility creates independent relationships. Visibility creates recognition. Visibility creates options.

Craig preferred to be the only bridge. Work traveled up through him and credit traveled back down as vague praise. He would take what you built and present it with his fingerprints on it, then later he would tell you privately how much he appreciated you, as if appreciation could substitute for acknowledgment.

That kind of leadership doesn’t just drain people. It teaches them to stop trying.

Then there were the ones everyone stopped defending.

Luis had earned his fall. Too much posturing, too little substance. Too many speeches, too few results. He always had a reason, always had a story, always had someone else to point at when the numbers didn’t match the claims. When the demotion came, nobody looked surprised. Some people looked relieved.

And John, who once said, back at Sprint, that he liked us, that we were good, that we just needed the right structure, had also been quick to blame Marcelo when things collapsed. Marcelo became the convenient name to carry the weight. The scapegoat that made failure feel explainable.

But Marcelo wasn’t here anymore. So I found myself asking a question I didn’t say out loud in meetings, a question that burned anyway. Now what. Now that you cannot blame him, what will you call it.

People were tired. Not the kind of tired that a weekend fixes. The kind of tired that gets into your bones after years of being told you are lucky to be here while you are worked past your limits, after watching friendships win promotions while competence gets cut, after realizing that loyalty only matters when it flows upward.

And the thing that hurt most was how normal everyone tried to make it sound.

They called it optimization. They called it efficiency. They called it the future.

But it felt like exploitation.

Work until you have nothing left, then watch the ones with the right relationships keep their seats while the rest of you are treated like a cost line. It makes you start thinking in ways you never planned to think. It makes you look at competitors you used to dismiss and feel a strange longing for basic dignity.

I found myself thinking I would rather pay more elsewhere if it meant being treated like a human being. I found myself imagining what it would look like to stop defending a brand that no longer defended its people.

By the end of that Monday, it wasn’t just the layoffs that changed the room. It was the clarity.

The organization had a new shape now, and it was obvious who it was built around. The rest of us were just expected to fit ourselves into the empty spaces.

Next cascade should focus on redoing cascade 1. Since cascade 2, we’ve seen the same incompetent leadership coming through. How about doing cascade 1 correctly before shaving associates first? As they say, it all starts with leadership and we have it seen one in a while. Btw… doing listening posts is not enough.

Those of you saying that without a leadership change this won’t be a big deal. Steve Llewellyn‘s retirement was announced Friday. John Dean is coming to Frito US from Beverages.

That’s probably the first domino. Since it’s PEPNA, that’s the US and Canada. Prob some realignment and HQ roles being shifted to GBS

Since we benchmark everything else, why don’t we benchmark our leaders as well? If we had, we likely wouldn’t be in the situation we’re in today.

Reflecting back on the past 25+ years....wow we really had great leaders who built Verizon the right way in Seidenberg and Denny Strigl. They literally started from the bottom and moved up to CEO. It's been downhill in leadership ever since .....

From Ivan:

“Leadership is all about standards . . . those people who watch you . . . they watch how you do your work. Do you cut corners?”

“Leadership is also about respect – how you treat other people. Do you treat others as equal?”

"...when you're in a position of power, what you think is right and correct doesn’t always mean it’s right and correct. To earn respect and trust, a good leader performs the job according to the needs of the people around them, rather than their own ideas. “It wasn’t what I thought was a good job, it was what the people around me thought was a good job.”

Leading by serving the needs of others may sound counter-intuitive, but it’s an effective technique.

It was a rough 8 years watching Hans post his daily morning runs, weekly sporting events and late night concerts. We wasted 8 years with him. He was a Trojan horse.

Penny Pennington announced Edward Jones is the official Wealth Management partner of the Big XII Conference. This figures. A third class wealth management firm for a third class athletic conference. Everyone knows the top two conferences are the Big 10 and the SEC. Come on, Penny, if you really mean business you should do better. Everyone knows you are not a real leader and you are in over your head. That is why you could only secure a deal with the Big XII. While the Big 10 and the SEC have been adding programs leading the NCAA in positive growth the Big XII has been losing programs and been scrambling to pick up third tier programs to fill the holes. This sounds very similar to Penny Pennington's leadership at Edward Jones. While top leaders at Schwab, Raymond James, and LPL take talent from Edward Jones Penny Pennington is scrambling to fill the gaps as best as she can. Penny Pennington is just not adding up. Penny Pennington has already sealed her fate as a doomed leader in firm history.

We know leadership at a certain point is about potential- not actual merit or experience/ qualifications.

Who would you say our great leaders would be if it was really up to merit and qualifications?

It’s clear that Fidelity cannot and will not develop managers to be leaders.

Is there a strength that the firm has that could reshape my opinion of the firm? Things were better before the pandemic, but it doesn’t seem like work will ever go back to being a great place to work.

I’ve been kicked down so many times that even the bare minimum is more effort than the company deserves. It’s not just me, it’s my whole department and probably just a leadership style.

There needs to be a process to demote or fire the managers who were hired during the pandemic, with no experience or qualifications.

Does anyone know the numbers? When will the useless VPs be let go? Totally directionless with no vision.

CDO, then CDO/CIO, then CDOA/CIO is laid himself off by taking another job. The sad thing is he has taken credit for the work of those who earned their jobs without a friendship with Christa Quarles.

• he did not lead an overhaul of the company's platforms, IT infrastructure, and business applications to improve security and facilitate more efficient operations.
• he was given a fully secure an operational infrastructure. Under his management he lost two very savvy infrastructure leaders along with other managers and ICs who didn't trust his experience or the people he hired from OpenTable.
• we are hosted in AWS and Azure mostly and all the operations were already efficient and secure
• nothing changed regarding how the company used data as the team responsible is very savvy.
• there was nothing to modernize considering AWS, Azure and GCP along with the rest of the SaaS apps the prior CIO and security leader implemented.
• the Senior Director, Global Services left as he didn't trust him nor Christa.
• the CTO had to obtain an updated SOC2 Type 2 after Grant and the CISO let the certification lapse for two years.

Why does HPE keep shuffling the same leaders around? Is there no one else in their mind that can do a lot of these jobs? Doesn’t look like people that want to move up will get the chance. Plus all of it feels mundane and routine nothing exciting about any of it.

How long untill the new CES guy becomes CEO. Another Accenture guy will be a big success just like Sal. Anyone else hearing anything?

Chief Transformation Officer.....

So much experience for someone that is probably not even 40 years old. smh

Early Retirement Program, RIF, and all the talk of cost cutting so that another C Suite title can be created. A position that, most would question, should be the skills of the current $15M per year CEO. smh

Anyone agrees with this ?
We thought Wayne was the monster.

A reporter asked a Marine. "Why are Marines so good at what they do?" The Marine replied, "Officers Eat Last."

Yes, it is a common practice and a widely held belief in the Marine Corps that officers should eat last. This isn't a strict rule, but rather a symbolic gesture and a practical demonstration of putting the needs of their subordinates (enlisted Marines) before their own. It emphasizes the principle of selfless leadership and prioritizing the well-being of the team.

Here's a more detailed explanation:

Symbolic gesture:
The act of eating last in the chow line reinforces the idea that leaders are responsible for the welfare of their Marines and that they prioritize their needs.

Practical application:
In the field, junior Marines are often the ones doing the most physically demanding work and need to be properly fed to maintain their energy and readiness.

Leadership principle:
This practice is deeply rooted in the Marine Corps' leadership philosophy, which emphasizes service, responsibility, and putting the needs of the team first.

Beyond the chow line:
While it's most visible in the chow line, the concept of "leaders eat last" extends to various aspects of Marine life, where leaders are expected to make sacrifices and ensure the well-being of their Marines.

Not just a saying:
While some might consider it a saying, it's a practice that many Marines take seriously and strive to uphold.

I never knew this but subscribed to this philosophy for some time now. Focus on serving other versus self-serving.