Perthblog

This is the official Perth blog site for posts, comments, and other contributions about leadership, behavioral finance and economics, and about management generally, as well as other related topics that take our fancy.

How About We Give Greater – Not Just Equal – Rights to Women?!


Post Summary: Men holding the power is the fundamental structural impediment to ending global war and poverty and extending good health to all. The Second(ary) Sex Which astronauts will be the first to go to Mars, men or women? Seems like women win this race.(“Study finds female astronauts more efficient, suggesting future space missions with all-f...

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Leadership Undaunted: Space Tourism Says America is Back!


  Who Knew? This is the very week that Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos went into space (or near as) and Elon Musk has booked a suborbital flight on Virgin Galactic for a time yet to be announced. Yet the press coverage has been at best muted and occasionally disparaging. As in, they didn’t actually go into real space, just a 3-minute taste of minima...

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Buffet: It’s the Personable Leaders You Have to Watch Out For!


  Can You Trust Shoeless CEOs? So, the truth is out, from no less than the oracle of Omaha. What’s the skinny? The biggest problem we face in investing in companies are the CEOs themselves. You knew that didn’t you? According to the Oracle, “You get a guy or a woman in charge of it—they’re personable, the directors like ’em—they don’t know what the...

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Coaching Leaders in a Recession – It’s a Whole New Ballgame


  Before - Business Acumen for the Birds I don’t have to tell you now the world is a totally different place. Before it was BCV -Before Coronavirus. Now we’re just shifting into the ACV – After Coronavirus world. That world is totally different. My day business is leadership development. We have developed assessments that assess whether people will...

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Do most leaders lack business acumen?

  Uh oh, GE just warned of another year of falling profits. It recently sold off its BioPharma unit making investors feel a bit better, until they realized things were still getting worse. GE needed to do something after cutting its dividend and reporting a huge loss. Jack Welch would be turning in his grave except for the fact that he’s alive. Do ...

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Why don't risk managers worldwide use behavior as a component of financial and investment risk?


Perth Leadership Institute and its Founder, Dr. E. Ted Prince do a new take on an old issue. See the article by Katherine Heires in GARP Risk Intelligence, the News service of the Global Association of Risk Professionals.  

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Is authoritarian leadership inevitable?


We’ve just seen China approve a lifting of term limits on their leader, an epochal decision. Clearly there’s a move to authoritarian leadership globally. As well as China there’s the usual suspects like Russia, Belarus and North Korea, but now there’s some new/newish members of the club including Turkey, Hungary, Poland, Venezuela, Malaysia and Mya...

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Robocracy – for when democracy doesn’t work any more


For lovers of democracy, what’s not to dislike? Dystopian news from Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Ukraine, North Korea and so on. Not to mention German, Hungary, Myanmar. Even (especially?) the US! Could things get worse? You remember “The End of History” by Francis Fukuyama? Liberalism and democracy triumph, nothing left to do until mankind reache...

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Amazon Eats Whole Foods – Are Authentic Leaders Too Predictable?


So we didn’t expect Amazon to do the Whole Foods thing right? Bezos is an unpredictable guy. Reminds me of Elon Musk, Richard Branson, even (especially) Donald Trump. Unpredictable to a fault. Never know what they’re gonna do next. The traditional leadership canon teaches that leaders should be predictable; authentic they call it. But what I see is...

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Uber-Leading - Are empathy and disruptiveness incompatible?


So Travis Kalanick of Uber has been given the boot. What’s that all about? He’s promoted a hostile and sexually harassing culture. He needs to be reformed. Is his departure going to kill the company? Probably. I can think of several leaders who totally lacked empathy; more; they were unsympathetic, bullies, sometimes narcissistic and unappealing hu...

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What’s wrong with quant approaches?


You know the old story: when a celebrity gets to be Time Person of the Year, it’s time to short them. Obama received the honor twice, in 2008 and 2012 and look where that got him! Trump was Time Person of the Year 2016 so look out! In the same vein I notice that the Wall Street Journal now has a new and separate section on quants. Does that mean th...

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Are dynasties the future of democracy?


So I know I don’t have to remind you that we have a family running the US of A. Let’s say that it continues, with or without a gap between other family members also getting into the saddle. That’s what a dynasty is, in both cases. And this is hardly new. In modern times we’ve had the Kennedys, the Bushes and the Clintons. The Roosevelts before that...

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Shouldn’t leadership be about business outcome, not about traits?


Did you notice that Tesla is now worth as much as General Motors? Quite a milestone given the fact that Tesla sells 80,000 cars a year versus GM’s 2 million plus.  Does that tell us something about leadership? My go-to reference Wikipedia defines a leadership style as a way of “providing direction, implementing plans, and motivating people”. T...

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Does Big Data Diminish Leadership Purpose?


Big data is really big. So is analytics. Our interns all want to get a job in those areas, so they can hit one out of the park. The big idea is that Big Data can help us uncover insights especially into how consumers act, so we can get them to buy more, and, to be fair, to better meet their needs. Big Data is transforming business, companies and ev...

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The leaderati are out of touch with the masses!


I guess there’s no need to engage in any further exegesis concerning the latest Black Swans on the political front, domestically and globally. But I’ve been surprised that the leadership literati (let’s call them the leaderati) haven’t been talking about what this all means for leadership thinking. Seems to me it means a whole lot. So what does lea...

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Is real behavioral change ever possible?


Well this is taking a different view. There is a huge supply of companies and methods to make you a better person, a better leader, a better manager and so on. And the vast majority, if not every last man-jack of them, are based on the assumption that people can change their behavior, if not a lot, then at least a little. Aren’t we humans just a li...

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Leadership gurus lose to Robo-Coaches!


Did you know that the classic book “Moby Dick” has been translated into emojis? Yep, to wit, “Emoji Dick”. What’s the world coming to? I guess like almost everyone in the world you use messaging on your phone. Maybe you have even been known to use emojis, but only with your kids, right?. Same here, but I have also been known to use them (suitably c...

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Labor still beats capital in leadership development


As is my wont I was recently idly surfing the net checking out stuff about leadership. I ran across the latest issue of Entrepreneur magazine, a very good publication I am sure. Here were its three top headlines on the leadership page: 3 Tough Habits You Must Drop to Succeed9 Things Managers Do That Make Good Employees Quit22 Qualities That Make a ...

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How do negative interest rates impact leadership and risk globally?


It just came out that the Bank of Ireland and RBS bank have introduced negative interest rates on large deposits. Germany and Japan both have banks with negative interest rates, as well as some of the Scandinavians. That’s got to qualify as a megatrend. It looks like negative interest rates are spreading fast. We are in uncharted territory. Likely ...

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Is organizational culture over-hyped?


If you’re in HR, or you’re the CEO of an organization, chances are that you talk a lot about your “unique” organizational culture. It’s also a favorite of academics. Definitely politically correct. But even the promoters of organizational culture don’t exactly know what it means – see for example this article, direct from the PC headquarters of aca...

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