Guest piece by Dr Stephanie Parson.

I used to believe that there were three levels of leadership: leading self, leading teams and leading organizations. However, there is a fourth level – leading global settings or global change. 

How does one move from leading organizations to leading global change? Think about it; there are very few people who actually lead from a global perspective. In countries where there are Presidents, one could say that these individuals have reached that fourth level of leadership. And of course we can look at world industry leaders such as Richard Branson, Percy Barnevik, Warren Buffett and David Simon; however, the question becomes, what makes these individuals different from those of us who have mastered the first three levels of leadership?

Wal-Mart Stores, Inc., announced yesterday that its board of directors has nominated Marissa A. Mayer, the Female Face of Google Inc. for election as a new member of the company’s board at Walmart’s Annual Shareholders’ Meeting on June 1, 2012. If elected, Mayer would become the sixteenth member of the board. What can Wal-mart expect from Marissa Mayer? Vision, passion, excitement, drive and loyalty?

Artist producing under their own label are everywhere. One of them is Sara Schiralli, she is releasing The Clearing through her own label and a cool video accompanies the track.

Beautiful, Italian born & London raised, from 'under ground' Camden in the UK and she makes gritty pop music, drawing influences from early pink Floyd to more haunting piano sounds,– there's currently a strong underground following for Schiralli in France and things are starting to go the same way in the UK.

Time for a short interview:

Some 500 people packed the theatre on a recent Monday evening at the Business Leaders Network (BLN) event showcasing Eric Ries, Silicon Valley entrepreneur and author of The Lean Startup. (Well done BLN, and especially Mark Littlewood, who hosted the proceedings and ran the Q&A with aplomb and humour.)

This and numerous other packed TLS events in the preceding week in Ireland and the UK showed that Ries’s fame preceded him, even drawing attendees from continential Europe.

Much has already been written and said online about the Lean Startup method, and the book is so widely available that I don’t think I need to give a thorough synopsis here. Ries also has the occasional detractor who says that the method is not novel, not really ‘scientific’ as claimed, not workable beyond digital industries, and that it risks creating teams who will iterate to infinity and never figure out what to build.