If you are managing an organization, be it small or large, you need to realize that what you say is listened to more carefully than you think. Hence, you better be objective. Also, any communication is an opportunity to create enthusiasm for your vision and the plans for achieving it.

Great leaders set the expectation that the organization will do exciting things and execute with excellence.

The recent announcement that RIM, the parent company of the BlackBerry, was lowering the price of its tablet, called the PlayBook, to $199 is a clear indication that the company is beginning to realize how late it was to the tablet market and how pedestrian the product is.

Nobody is irreplaceable – we may think our contributions are huge, but there are a lot of talented people out there.

2011 proved to be a very challenging business year, but, as with most years, there were some great examples of gutsy leadership and some of the reverse … Here are my picks for best and worst of 2011!

Did you ever have a boss whose span of control consisted of only 2 or 3 direct reports? It is very frustrating. He or she is just not busy enough, so they meddle, wasting a lot of people’s time and preventing the direct reports from having full authority and responsibility. Narrow spans of control typically mean more bosses which leads to excessive layers which fosters bureaucracy.

In Nokia’s 3rd quarter investor conference call in October, 2007, the CFO was immensely proud that they posted record revenue and profit by achieving record sales of their low end phones. Also, he enthusiastically noted that even though the average price of those phones dropped 10%, they retained the same profit margin. The stock price [...]

In a recent Wall Street journal article, Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon.com, said “To get something new done, you have to be stubborn and focused, to the point that others might find unreasonable.” That statement reminds me of a story from Ford Motor Company when Alan Mulally was making the rounds shortly after he joined the company in 2006 as CEO.

He was bemoaning the fact that Amazon has lowered the prices of books beyond his ability to match them, and now they are locking up big authors and will exclusively offer their books in paper or digital formats, depending on the customer’s preference. He lamented: “They’re bullies. They really are. I think they really want to be a monopoly.”

Too often we back off from giving the organization specific direction. That’s a recipe for maintaining the status quo, not generating significant results.