Barnabas File

“The strongest organizations are learning organizations.     Their structures and systems make the development of people the everyday default, which makes them agile, resilient, and impactful.”—Eduardo Briceno,   The Performance Paradox   I’ll be honest.  When I received this book, I jumped over the first section on individual growth and went right to the section on applying the principles in teams and organizations.  I have long been an admirer of Carol Dweck’s work on mindset, so I wanted to see how author Eduardo Briceno applied the concept to organizations.  I was not disappointed.     Briceno provides helpful insights on developing a growth-oriented mindset in organizations based on interviews, research, and personal experience.  One key idea is great leaders are great learners.  Unless the leader is forward-leaning and oriented toward personal growth and development, she or he cannot expect to lea...

When Satya Nadella succeeded Steve Balmer as CEO of Microsoft in 2014, he took the helm of a once thriving company that now seemed adrift.     The problem was not so much profitability but a stagnant culture.     The company that Bill Gates founded was now more concerned about return on investment than creativity.    According to Mark Miller in Culture Rules , the emphasis was on transaction rather than transformation.   In 2015, Nadella unveiled a new mission: “To empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more.”  This was definitely a desire to be transformational rather than simply transactional.  But how would he help create a culture to achieve this aspirational goal?   To accomplish this, Nadella challenged every frontline leader to model, coach, and care.   First, the leader should have a growth mindset and embody the values of the organization.  A leader should be committed to an...