Work Naturally with E. Forrest Christian
As I said in Just Make A Decision!, my father was an advocate of “Just make a decision!” You might have thought that this meant that he didn’t think that data and information could help you make better decisions. You wouldn’t be farther from the truth. My father was a Statistical Process Control expert, which became Quality Control which became …
Elliott Jaques is rightly praised for many things: first one to apply the ideas of social culture to the life inside organizations; identified and named the “mid-life crisis” (sorry Gail Sheehy!); led the longest on-site social research efforts at Glacier Metal Company, running some 25 years; and developing a method for building the requisite organizational structure for any managerial endeavor. …
Last time we heard from Danny Fleming, the banking executive, who said that his success was in a large part due to his ability to make decisions when others would dither. This time I’m going to a Danny closer to home: my late father, “Danny” Christian. I was reminded of his thinking on decision making recently when a relative told …
Successful people — people who get things done and not just kiss asses — have on thing in common: they can make decisions. You’d think it would be leadership or emotional intelligence or even financial acumen. But it’s not. It all comes down to getting things done. And if you want to get things done, you have to make decisions. …
“He’s a real software developer,” I told her. “It’s not just that he’s ‘in a different league’”, I said. “He’s playing an entirely different game.” I was sitting with a business lead who oversaw a large IT project. She and I were talking about the best people on the team. I mentioned that Ivan was clearly the best we had. …
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I know that Walmart isn’t trying to be a customer service king. They compete entirely on price. I don’t enjoy being around that many people – Walmart is successful at always being crowded – so I haven’t been in one in awhile. I’m not one of those Walmart haters, either: in the past I’ve always considered Walmart the epitome of …
I used to think Walmart was the king of retail operations. Smaller operations like Harris Teeter could learn a lot about how to do things from them. But after experiencing customer service in both recently, I know that Harris Teeter could take Walmart to school on basic customer service and loyalty. Harris Teeter, for those not in North Carolina, is …
Recently, we had all the Manasclerk Company folks’ CVs/resumes redone by a professional writer. Yes, I am well aware of the irony that a group of people who have all been paid to write had to hire someone else to write consulting bios. But that’s the way it is: a good writer seems to be flummoxed at his own tooting. …
“Bill Gates has no strategy for Microsoft!” This was the cry of the business and computing press in the late 1980s. It seemed absolutely accurate. Except that it wasn’t. Bill Gates knew something us idiots in the computing world didn’t. Here’s the story.
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Flow, the psychological state of high-performance where one loses one’s self in the work one is doing, is something that we think people crave. Bioss International posits that when we have a job that challenges us just enough but not overwhelms — a job that “fits” — we experience flow. But do we? Or more specifically, do the activities required …
