Hot Topics and Debate

Leadership Development

• Developing Leaders 
  The fifth annual Wharton Leadership Conference brought leaders from academia, the military and the corporate world together to share views on leadership development.  Several of this speakers are profiled in June's Leadership Digest.
  
  

• Can Leadership Be Taught?
  Seventeenth-century Italian artists produced representations of light and dark, without regard for color, called "chiaroscuro." In simple terms, these artists created chiaroscuro images by drawing only shadows of a scene or object.  This is an apt metaphor for how we often think about developing leaders. We are critical of the executives we know, defining leadership by what they don't do or the skills they don't appear to possess. We develop leadership models from antonyms of what we observe. 
  
  

• Grassroots Leadership:  U.S. Military Academy
  The U.S. Military Academy is a factory, and what it manufactures is leaders. Over the years, it has become probably the most effective institution for leadership development in the country. (Fast Company, 2001)
  
  

• How Executives Grow
  Most companies are poor at developing their executives, and most of them acknowledge this:  only 3 percent of the 6,000 executives occupying the top 200 positions at 50 large US corporations examined by a recent McKinsey survey strongly agreed that their organizations developed talent quickly and effectively.   (McKinsey Quarterly 2000 Number 1)
  
  

• Fight. Learn. L*E*A*D
  With bombs bursting in air, 4,000 soldiers do battle at the Army's National Training Center - the world's most powerful laboratory for leadership development and change. Five lessons from the front lines of learning.