Dr. Jim Taylor

2 06, 2014

Prime Leadership Begins with Your Mindset

By Dr. Jim Taylor| 2014-06-06T07:45:22-07:00 June 2nd, 2014|Categories: Business|Tags: business, corporate, crisis, economy, executive, finance, global, leadership|0 Comments

This post extends my discussion of Leader-as-Person by exploring the role that your mindset plays in how you approach your leadership. I define mindset as the attitudes, beliefs, and expectations you hold that act as the foundation of who you are, how you lead, and the ways in which you interact with your team. Your mindset is so influential because it determines how you think about and interpret situations, your emotional reactions, the decisions you make, and the actions you take. Your mindset directly impacts the quality of your relationships, the interactions you have, and the way you lead. It also sets the tone for your organization and determines the kind of experiences your people have in their work lives. Your mindset isn’t just a bunch of touchy-feely psychology and relationship stuff either. It also has a big effect on your company’s bottom line, setting the stage of its performance, productivity, and, ultimately, its profitability. Your goal is to identify and create productive mindsets that result in Prime Leadership. There are four mindsets that I believe are important to have to be the most effective leader you can be.

3 03, 2014

Leader-as-Person: Who You Are is How You Lead

By Dr. Jim Taylor| 2014-05-29T10:05:54-07:00 March 3rd, 2014|Categories: Business|Tags: business, corporate, culture, leadership, personality, self-awareness, self-knowledge, temperament, values|2 Comments

In my first post in this series on leadership in the corporate world, I introduced you to the notion that there are roles that leaders must fulfill to be successful: person, performer, team builder, decision maker, and change agent. This post will explore what I believe lies at the heart of leadership: leader-as-person, who you are is how you lead. As I alluded to in my first post, I take a contrarian view of leadership: I don’t believe in leadership styles. Despite the many books written about leadership styles, I would argue that we are not capable of leading in ways that conflict with who we are. In other words, we can’t be someone we are not. Certainly, it is possible to expand the range of your leadership capabilities around the anchor of who you are; a great leader is always looking for ways to improve their leadership skills. For example, if you are an intense and emotional leader, you can learn to moderate your emotional reactions during a crisis to some degree. At the same time, it’s not likely you will ever be a Zen-type leader. Within notion of leader-as-person, the key for you is to fully understand who you are and, given who you are, maximize your effectiveness as a leader. With this information, you can then identify the strengths and weaknesses you have as a leader and can work to build your strengths and mitigate your weaknesses, thus allowing who you are to emerge as a more effective leader.

28 01, 2014

Taylor Post Gets HuffPost Headline

By Dr. Jim Taylor| 2014-01-28T07:54:29-08:00 January 28th, 2014|Categories: Business|Tags: bottom line, business, corporate, leadership, organizations, profits|0 Comments

I'm excited that my recent business-related post, The Five Things Great Leaders Must Do Very Well, nabbed the headline on the Huffington Post Small Businesses page.

27 01, 2014

The 5 Things Great Leaders Do Very Well

By Dr. Jim Taylor| 2014-01-27T10:31:55-08:00 January 27th, 2014|Categories: Business|Tags: business, corporate, decision making, leadership, leadership style, performance, success, team, team building|7 Comments

Leadership is one of the truly hot topics in the corporate world. Can you believe that there are more than 17,000 books on leadership available on Amazon? That statistic tells me that there are no clear answers on the best way to lead a company, organization, or team. Given that I work extensively in both the corporate and sports world, where effective leadership is essential, I wanted to share my perspective on what makes a great leader. Let’s start with where I stand on leadership. First, what is a leader? Your answer may include inspiring employees, having a strategic vision and plan, or knowing how to hire or delegate. All of these are necessary, but not sufficient, conditions for being a leader. But the purest definition of a leader I can offer is: someone with followers. Without them, there is no leader. I also want to add a rather heretical view of leadership: I don’t believe in leadership styles. We certainly hear plenty from all sorts of business gurus that this style or that is ideal. You hear about autocratic, democratic, collaborative, visionary, transactional, transformational, participative, laissez-faire, servant, the list goes on. I would argue, however, that talking about styles has little value because we are incapable of leading in a way that is inconsistent with who we are as people. However you lead, there are certain roles you must fulfill to be a successful leader of your team and to achieve the goals you have established for your business. I believe that leaders have five essential roles to fulfill to be effective.

8 11, 2013

Long-term Business Success Means Seeing the Future

By Dr. Jim Taylor| 2013-11-08T15:44:38-08:00 November 8th, 2013|Categories: Business|Tags: Albert Einstein, Blackberry, Blockbuster, business, companies, competition, failure, finance, future, Law of Insanity, market share, markets, mismanagement, past, research and development, revenues, sales and marketing, success, technology|1 Comment

As many businesses have learned the hard way in the last 15 years, becoming established and having short-term success is no guarantee of sustaining long-term success. Increased competition, financial mismanagement, professional missteps, and economic downturns can all contribute to the downfall of a once-successful business. The challenge for many companies, particularly small ones, is that they are so busy in the day-to-day operations of the business, the lack the time and energy to maintain an eye on the future that is essential for long-term success. To ensure that long-term success, you must engage in a comprehensive examination of your business that includes evaluating the past and “visioning” the future. This process involves what you have done and what you need to do to ensure that it has the “legs” to sustain itself for many years to come. Note: Apologies for the double-November newsletters. The first November newsletter, Focus is the Gateway to Business Success, was the belated September issue.

1 11, 2013

Focus is the Gateway to Business Success

By Dr. Jim Taylor| 2013-11-01T10:06:48-07:00 November 1st, 2013|Categories: Business|Tags: business, computers, corporate, distractions, focus, multitasking, performance, psychology, smartphones, tablets, technology|0 Comments

Focus doesn’t get the respect it deserves in the business world. We hear a lot about motivation, stress, emotions, leadership, and team culture, but not much attention is paid to the role that focus plays in your ability to be productive. Well, I’m here to change all that. Let’s first start with what focus is. Simply put, focus involves the ability to pay attention to things that will help and avoid distractions that will hurt your work efforts. For example, to finish a report, you need to focus on the relevant information and analyses that will comprise the report. You must also avoid typical distractions such as emails, being hungry or tired, or the people around you.

28 10, 2013

Latest News: Fox Business News Interview: Psychology of the Stock Market

By Dr. Jim Taylor| 2013-10-28T07:02:46-07:00 October 28th, 2013|Categories: Latest News|Tags: business, cognitive biases, evolution, fear, fox news, investing, money, retirement, stock market|0 Comments

I was recently interviewed on Fox Business News on the topic of the Psychology of the Stock Market. In this interview I discuss the three reasons why many people are afraid to invest in the stock market.

5 08, 2013

The New Demands of 21st Century Leadership

By Dr. Jim Taylor| 2013-08-05T07:05:07-07:00 August 5th, 2013|Categories: Business|Tags: business, CEO, companies, corporate, decision making, health, leadership, relationships, ROI, stress, technology|0 Comments

Perhaps the most frequently asked questions these days in boardrooms, corner offices, and business school classes is: What is leadership and how has it changed in the 21st century? There is little doubt that the business landscape has changed in the last two decades driven primarily by two forces: globalization and technology. Not surprisingly, these two market influences have directly impacted how heads of companies lead. The most notable change has been in what skills are believed to be necessary to lead a company. In previous generations, business leaders were chosen for their specific business acumen including their business-related knowledge and skill sets such as finance, marketing, or strategy. Pedigree and education also played a role in who was placed on the top floor of a company. In recent years though, there has been a shift toward less-tangible psychological, emotional, and people skills as prerequisites for leaders. Of course, the hard skills are still important—leaders still need to know the nuts and bolts of their business—but these knowledge sets have become, in my experience, necessary but not sufficient, for getting the key to the executive washroom. I have identified four such areas that have gained prominence in my work with senior management of companies around the world during the last decade.

20 05, 2013

Cognitive Biases are Bad for Business

By Dr. Jim Taylor| 2014-07-09T12:56:24-07:00 May 20th, 2013|Categories: Business|Tags: business, cognitive biases, corporate, decisions, economics, rational actor|7 Comments

The conventional wisdom in classical economics is that we humans are “rational actors” who, by our nature, make decisions and behave in ways that maximize advantage and utility and minimize risk and costs. This theory has driven economic policy for generations despite daily anecdotal evidence that we are anything but rational, for example, how we invest and what we buy. Economists who embrace this assumption seem to live by the maxim, “If the facts don’t fit the theory, throw out the facts,” attributed, ironically enough, to Albert Einstein. But any notion that we are, in fact, rational actors, was blown out of the water by Dr. Daniel Kahneman, the winner of the 2002 Nobel Prize for economics, and his late colleague Amos Tversky. Their groundbreaking, if not rather intuitive, findings on cognitive biases, have demonstrated quite unequivocally that humans make decisions and act in ways that are anything but rational.

28 01, 2013

Real Corporate Change Takes the Six I’s

By Dr. Jim Taylor| 2013-03-14T12:13:45-07:00 January 28th, 2013|Categories: Business|Tags: business, change, competitoin, corporate, global market, market share, Trium Group|0 Comments

Let’s be honest, corporate change is difficult, really difficult. Whether a start-up experiencing growing pains, a company faced with increased competition, a floundering company trying to stay afloat, or a successful business attempting to expand into global markets, the path toward change can often be unclear at best and the barriers can seem insurmountable at worst. Yet change your company must if it is going to become or remain a “player” in its market. The question isn’t whether your business must change; that is a given if you want it to survive and thrive. Rather, the question is: Will our company change? If you answer in the affirmative, there are two more questions that you must ask. First, what will your company change? In the ever-morphing marketplace, there isn’t always clarity on what needs to be changed for a company to stay competitive. Second, how specifically will your company change? It’s one thing to have grand ideas about what changes your company needs to make. It’s an entirely different thing to take those “50,000 feet” ideas and bring them down to Earth. Though change is always complex, like all complicated processes, it begins with a basic framework that orients and guides the course of transformation. A useful way of framing this process is by what The Trium Group calls “the Six I’s”: intention, inspiration, information, insight, integration, and implementation.

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