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Here are five choice articles from the business schools, the business press and major consulting firms to start off your work week. I'm pointing you to articles about preparing technical experts for leadership, the pressure for short-term performance, improvisation as a management style, making services a science, and effective business innovation.

From Industry Week: Closing the Leadership Gap
"Preparing a technical expert to become an effective line leader"

Wally's Comment: This is an article about how one company developed a program to help technical experts become effective line leaders. There are lots of good insights here, but I hope there will be a follow-up report in a year that tells us how the people they "prepare" actually do on the job.

From Wharton: Shooting the Messenger: Quarterly Earnings and Short-term Pressure to Perform
"As the quarterly earnings season for the second quarter of 2010 gets underway, investors, analysts and the media will be watching to see how well public companies are emerging from the economic downturn, and what that might mean for the stock market. With unemployment rates still high and federal measures of economic growth shaky, observers are hoping for earnings numbers that reaffirm signs of a recovery. "

Wally's Comment: Quarterly earnings have become the way to measure company and CEO performance. That's dumb. Financial earnings alone do not measure everything important about a company. A quarterly cycle gives executives an incentive to sacrifice long term success on the altar of short-term results. Consider the following from Jeff Bezos.

"Most [of our new] businesses have either no impact on our financials for the first five to seven years or a negative impact on our financials for the first five to seven years."

From the Graziado Business Report: Improvisation as a Way of Dealing with Ambiguity and Complexity
"Organizations are changing, and changing quickly, and managers who do not recognize—and more importantly—react, to this emerging truth, will struggle to compete as markets become more demanding and competition intensifies."

Wally's Comment: This is a marvelous article about how companies can succeed in a fast-changing business environment. What Tom Hall and I found in the research for our book, Ruthless Focus: How to use key core strategies to grow your business , was that we already have some good models for how this can happen. Simply put, there are companies who have replaced "strategic plans" with "strategic direction" and modified rules and structures to allow effective adaptation and improvisation.

From WP Carey: Making Services a Science: New Study Finds Great Interest -- and Great Confusion
"As Vice President of Innovation and Strategy Management at Columbus, Ohio-based Cardinal Health, Kim Gravell is charged with helping her company create new and innovative solutions in the realm of customer-focused services. It doesn't seem like an overly complicated job description. But even Gravell admits that she's had some difficulty at times explaining to her colleagues just exactly what "services innovation" is, why services are so crucial in today's marketplace -- and why services, well, matter."

Wally's Comment: There are lots of articles out there about the importance of innovation. This one gives you a view into how one company tries to turn the generic "be innovative" advice into actual bottom line results. 

From the NY Times: Innovate, Yes, but Make It Practical
"BUSINESS is a field not of theory but of practice. The central intellectual inquiry of the science of management is simply this: What works? That, it seems, is the best way to examine the steady rise in the practice of innovation management. A search of the database of the professional networking site LinkedIn found that more than 700 people listed their current job title as “chief innovation officer” and that nearly 25,000 had the word “innovation” in their job title. Many others may not have the word in their titles, but their job is to pursue opportunities that result in new products, services and more efficient ways of doing things."

Wally's Comment: It's innovation again. This time the article talks about generating practical results.

For additional reading, check out articles about "How Ingersoll Rand puts Customers First in the Drive for Innovation" and the innovation playbook at Corning as well as my post on "Three Kinds of Innovation ."

If you enjoyed this post, you may want to check back on Wednesday when I select five excellent posts from the week's independent business blogs. Last week I highlighted posts on truths about leadership, paying attention to what works, creating a great working environment, storytelling as a management technique, and trust. As a bonus, there was a pointer to a post on questionable assumptions about work.

My most-read blog post from last week was "Idea Deficit Disorder – Treating Yourself ."

My post that drew the most comments was "The HP Way."

And be sure to find out more about my latest book, Ruthless Focus: How to use key core strategies to grow your business or just jump right over to Amazon and buy a few.