Leadership and Judgment

Still it is clearly important to understand the role of leadership in competitive success and innovation. In “Judgment: How Winning Leaders Make Great Calls”, Noel M.Tichy and Warren G. Bennis, make the case that leaders make crucial judgments in three areas; People, Strategy, and Crises. Judgments are characterized by three phases; Preparation, the Call and Execution. At a high level it might be of interest to consider where some of these leadership failures have occurred according to these three types of judgments. For example, Amanda Lang author of The Power of Why in a recent interview on the CBC suggests that RIM’s shortcoming were that is was too content with the status quo.  Perhaps this was a failure of strategy, trying to focus on the business market and not being aware of the potential of competing devices that were popular with consumers to become dominant in business as well.  In terms of leadership challenges in the RCMP, judgments with respect to people seem to have been a key issue when two Commissioners have had to be replaced since 2007.