Laura A. Davis is the President and Founder of Laura A. Davis & Associates, Inc., an Atlanta-based transformational coaching and leadership development and sales training firm.
Everyone loves a good story. 
Great leaders are aware of this and inspire others to own and share their own unique and special story. They help us to see how our narrative fits into the whole to make a difference. Corporate employees rarely go to work each day pondering the CEO’s vision or Wall Street’s valuation of their company if they work for a corporation. Few people think about the owner’s vision if they work in a store or any establishment created by someone else. Ideally, we “go to work” to make a living as well as a life. We all want to express our gifts and talents in a healthy work environment even in nontraditional venues.
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Nomi Prins is a writer and thinker, and author of the book entitled, “It Takes a Pillage”. This lecture was called, “Bailouts, Banks and Pyramids”.
Please! Set aside a few minutes and listen to the audio here:
http://bit.ly/NomiPrins 
She paints a clear and very disturbing picture of the shenanigans leading up to the financial meltdown, the continuing malfeasance in the banking and investment industry and – even more scary – lax oversight and enforcement inside the United States government.
It’s time to raise awareness of the realities of the current landscape, and also to elevate the discussion (and urgency) of what’s actually at stake and happening – things you probably won’t see on CNN anytime soon.
What is/was the role of women in the creation of this mess? And more importantly, what is the best use of individual and collective power to (a)plan for and protect ourselves and our families, and (b)move things however gradually toward a time and a mindset where feminine power is *at least* equal to men in authority? Read more
You might remember it, but a few years ago, there was a magazine ad that showed the icon Cher in a slinky gown, and beneath the photo of this perfect body, the tag line was something like, “Face it. If it came in a bottle, everybody would have a great body.”
Change and improvement doesn’t come in a bottle. And it doesn’t matter which ad agency is hawking which brand, and pushing which kind of bottle, or whether it’s a pill bottle, a liqour bottle, a energy drink bottle or any other kind of ‘bottle’.
Well, real change – REAL, TRANSFORMATIVE CHANGE – IS POSSIBLE. One of the lessons we learn as we move along in life is that almost everything worth anything takes effort on our part. In other words: IT AIN’T EASY! Never was, never will be. Read more
The focus of what Marnell Group is all about is change – in particular, using modern visual tools to help navigate upheaval and transformation.
It comes in lots of flavors, but what really happens when ‘things change’ in an organization?
I recall the palpable change that took place inside IBM on the occasion of the announcement, in 1986, of their first quarter without a dividend. That was unheard of and as a young analyst in the HR function, I could actually feel the walls squeezing in. Almost overnight there was a deep current of change in the halls of the National Marketing Division (NMD) headquarters in Atlanta where I worked. Division leaders disappeared and were replaced. And in an amazingly short span of time (days, literally) an entire mechanism emerged to move people from headquarters locations (where they were percieved as overhead) to the field where they could be part of the revenue generation engine. [The reality was that many were expected to fail in their new assignments - an 'attrition' component not publicized in order to not have to frontally address the IBM heritage of lifetime employment - which was decidedly ending. There's another post in all of that, though.] Read more
Following the thread of the Psychology Today article, find Alice Eagly, expert in gender related issues in the workplace and professor of psychology at Northwestern University, sharing on obstacles women face on their way to leadership positions, along with thoughts on improving womens access to authority in the workplace.
Download the mp3 of an interview with host Bonnie Marcus here. It’s a little fuzzy from a sound quality standpoint, but interesting if you can go with it.
“…women are more transformational than men – they care more about developing their followers, they listen to them and stimulate them to think “outside the box,” they are more inspirational, AND they are more ethical.”
This article in Psychology Today paints with a brush that, to me, seems a bit broad. But it’s still topical and interesting.
Find this article by Ronald Riggio, Ph.D. here.
Did you know that the top drill instructor for the U.S. Army is a woman? Those with memories that span decades recognize such a thing would have been utterly ridiculous and unthinkable awhile back. But – here it is! 
Read about Sergeant Major King here.
Great leaders are aware of this and inspire others to own and share their own unique and special story. They help us to see how our narrative fits into the whole to make a difference. Corporate employees rarely go to work each day pondering the CEO’s vision or Wall Street’s valuation of their company if they work for a corporation. Few people think about the owner’s vision if they work in a store or any establishment created by someone else. Ideally, we “go to work” to make a living as well as a life. We all want to express our gifts and talents in a healthy work environment even in nontraditional venues.