Archive for October, 2009
The Mark of a Leader: How to Prepare Your Successor October 5 2009 one response
The end of last week brought a couple of mirror image stories about leaders in the world of finance. The first was the sudden announcement from Bank of America CEO Ken Lewis that he intends to retire at the end of the year. As reported in The Economist, the B of A board is going to have to scramble to come up with a successor. In contrast is the news coming out of JP Morgan Chase that CEO Jamie Dimon has named a new head of investment banking in what he acknowledges is a key building block of a leadership succession plan. 
As quoted in the New York Times, Dimon said, “It’s my duty to the board to focus on succession. It’s important that we have people trained and tested with experience to succeed me.”
As Joe Nocera pointed out in his weekly Talking Business column, one of the most important duties of a leader is to prepare his or her successor. This is true not just for CEO’s, but for leaders at any level. How do you do it? Here are five simple yet actionable ideas for preparing your successor:
Leadership Lessons from U2 October 2 2009 2 responses
Any week you can check something off your bucket list is a good week. This was one of those weeks for me as I checked off a long held goal of seeing U2 in concert. Bono and his band mates are on a six week tour and they stopped at FedEx field here in the DC area to rock the house. Thanks to some really nice long term planning on my wife’s part (she bought tickets for my birthday back in April), the two of us were there. I’ve been to countless concerts in my life and (I don’t think it’s just the recency effect speaking here) this one was the best. (In case you’re 
wondering what they’re playing on this tour, here’s a very cool web site with the set list and links to performances of each song.) The show that U2 put on was a combination of rock concert, multimedia extravaganza, political rally, massive party and religious revival. And, oh yeah, anytime somebody is keeping 90,000 people standing up for two and a half hours singing, dancing and completely engaged there’s probably something to be learned about leadership.
While it’s unlikely that most of us are going to be global rock stars anytime soon, I saw some great leadership lessons from Bono and the band that I want to pass on for your consideration.
Scott Eblin is an executive coach, speaker and author of 
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