digitalknowledgeworker.net

Here is an interesting bit by Jim Collins: 

Executives should read fewer management books. I don’t mean that reading is a waste of their time; on the contrary, they should read more. The question is what to read. My own view is that only one book in 20 should be a business book.

That may sound odd coming from an author of three management books, but I’m convinced that you can improve your leadership capabilities by drinking deeply from the well of great books that have been published in a wide variety of disciplines. For one thing, the business and management genres offer precious few superb books with new insights, good writing, and timeless value. I can think of fewer than 10 published in the last 50 years.

To read on: Find the original article here: http://www.jimcollins.com/lib/articles/01_96_a.html

From the author's homepage:

Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap . . . and Others Don’t
New York: HarperBusiness, 2001. 320 pages, 9 chapters.
Based on a five-year research project, Good to Great answers the question: “Can a good company become a great company, and, if so, how?” True to the rigorous research methodology and invigorating teaching style of Jim Collins, Good to Great teaches how even the dowdiest of companies can make the leap to outperform market leaders the likes of Coca-Cola, Intel, General Electric, and Merck

Main concepts:

Level 5 Leadership discussed here

First Who then What

Confront the brutal facts: The Stockdale Paradox (listen to audio here)

The hedgehog principle

Managing the vision

Audio files explaining more details can be found under

http://www.jimcollins.com/hall/index.html

1. Some basic background

Learning is an issue that mostly psychology as a science has been observing and researching. As such, the acquired results are by definition not universal applicable, they must be interpreted as findings of empirical testing. Be it behaviourist psychology, that completely ignores the cognitive functions of the mind or the cognitive psychology that specifically tries to open that black box, the formulation of concepts of learning and knowledge has not come to a rest.

Let us first start by defining "learning". We shall use the following definition of Zimbardo (1992):

"Learning is a process that leads to relatively stable changes in the behaviour or potential behaviour and that builds upon experiences. It cannot be observed, it must be inferred from the observable behaviour."

From that definition we can draw two basic consequences:

1. Learning can be identified by amelioration of performances
2. The performance does not reflect all learning

The latter consequence stresses, that there are believed to be conscious and subconscious learning processes that both form not explicit but rather potential ameliorations in behavior. We shall call this kind of learning latent learning.

2. Behaviorist and cognitive theory

What can be said about this approach to the conception of a persons learning, is that it focuses on the exterior conditions in learning situations. Behaviourism explicitly leaves the cognitive processes out of the picture. As such, the focus is on the triggering of reactions through impulses, especially on punishment and gratification of ones behaviour. Behaviourist theory is strongly founded on Pawlovs Experiments with so-called conditioning. The following links discuss his findings in more detail:

Professor Patrick Winston of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology gave a speach at Harvard on on how to talk. Here's what I will take along: