breaking sound barrier

Working in sales gives you fascinating insights into human nature and organisational dynamics.  Seeing how managers process the rational logic around business risk and return against their own career risk and return shows up the leaders who can make breakthrough decisions.  Decisions that require vision and judgement to introduce new approaches to opportunities or problems require confidence and integrity to stand out above the crowd, and to then bring the crowd along with them.  

To that end, John Husband wrote a great piece last year about the wisdom of the organisational crowd, pointing out that, today, leadership is "less and less about charisma, command and control, and more and more about conversations and championing and channeling the wisdom of that organizational crowd (and increasingly that crowd includes the customers, the suppliers, the vendors .. the whole shebang)."  Great intersection between the power of information and its internal spread/communication using the tools of social media - management by walking around (MBWA) is now management by blogging around (MBBA).