The term “strategic planning” conjures up images of suits in conference rooms diagramming the path to world domination on whiteboards. All too often, strategic planning is an activity reserved for the organizational elite—executives aided by consultants. The top dogs think up all the big ideas—and the “troops” execute the plan.

Imagine for a minute you are a member of the senior management team of a 5000-person, global organization. Your CEO has asked you and the entire senior management team to participate in an emergency week-long retreat.
 
He doesn't reveal the purpose of the meeting ahead of time, but as he kicks off the week, it is clear he is livid.

Editor's note: Research by McKinsey & Company's Organization Practice finds that better collaborative capabilities help companies achieve superior financial performance. These results are supported by academic research, which shows that the ability to collaborate in networks is more important than raw individual talent to innovativeness; it also boosts employees’ overall performance and loyalty.¹

As you're putting together the guest list for your holiday parties you might want to consider this: not once, but twice over the last five years I've embarked on an in-depth review of the academic and practical literature on leadership. The first time was for a 2006 book with Jeff Pfeffer, Hard Facts, Dangerous Half-Truths, and Total Nonsense. The second time was for my new book, Good Boss, Bad Boss.

When you ask children what they want to be when they are older, how many of them say they want to be a manager? I've certainly never met one who had such aspirations. In part this is because management is a pretty amorphous concept to a ten-year-old. But it's also because we adults aren't exactly singing the praises of the management profession either.  For example, in a 2008 Gallup poll on honesty and ethics among workers in 21 different professions, a mere 12 percent of respondents felt business executives had high/very high integrity--an all-time low.

As we build towards the deadline for choosing our M-Prize winners, we're taking a look at the Stories that MIXers have shared as entries. This week, 9 promising Stories about Reinventing Leadership.

The experience of growing up online will profoundly shape the workplace expectations of “Generation F” – the Facebook Generation. At a minimum, they’ll expect the social environment of work to reflect the social context of the Web, rather than as is currently the case, a mid-20th-century Weberian bureaucracy.

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