About Our Partnership With Center Of Creative Leadership (CCL)
The Wall Street Journal Europe Future Leadership Institute teamed up with the prestigious Center for Creative Leadership (CCL) to provide
high quality management and leadership content to our readers.
The Center of Creative Leadership (CCL)
The Center for Creative Leadership (CCL®) offers an exclusive focus on leadership education and research and unparalleled expertise in solving the leadership challenges of individuals and organizations everywhere. The Center for Creative Leadership equips clients around the world with the skills and insight to achieve more than they thought possible through creative leadership.
What is creative leadership? It's the capacity to think and act beyond the boundaries that limit our effectiveness. Every leader and organization faces obstacles that are difficult to surmount - from corporate executives confronting the complex global marketplace to educators trying to lift student achievement to nonprofit groups and government agencies addressing critical social issues with tight budgets.
CCL believes that solutions to these challenges exist — and for nearly 40 years CCL has helped clients unlock them through creative leadership. CCL believes leaders are made, not born, and that they can adapt and change. We believe that strong interpersonal skills, grounded in personal reflection and self-awareness, are the key to effective leadership.
History
The inspiration for the Center for Creative Leadership (CCL®) came from the visionary and highly successful businessman H. Smith Richardson Sr. In the years after Richardson had built the Vick Chemical Co. from a one-drugstore operation into a major international corporation, his thoughts turned to questions of leadership: how can businesses remain vital and continue to provide useful, innovative products and services through economic ups and downs, in the face of changes in the marketplace, and in spite of the inevitable succession of management groups?
Richardson was particularly interested in this last issue. Many enterprises eventually fail, he deduced, because management sooner or later "loses the ability to recognize and adjust to new and changing conditions." What organizations needed was not just leadership for the present and the near future, but innovative leadership with a broader focus and a longer view. Such leadership would be concerned not with profits, markets and business strategies alone, but with the place of business in society. This sort of leadership would come from people, Richardson said, with "minds that could do cross-country thinking." Only by taking into account the broader implications of decisions could a business remain stable and productive "throughout future decades and generations." What was needed, he realized, was creative leadership.
His dream of an independent institution devoted to the concept of creative leadership was realized with the founding of the Center for Creative Leadership in 1970. The Smith Richardson Foundation Inc. provided the initial financial underpinning for CCL. The Foundation — and several generations of the Richardson family — have remained generous supporters of CCL's work
This chapter will open summer 2009