After recently finishing a gig with a company that has hit a spate of bad luck, both self-inflicted and environmental, I have taken to reading. And as always when I read, I like to meander aimlessly through the thoughts of disparate thinkers who have nothing in common except that they caught my fancy for the moment. So my apologies to …
How To Get Double Digit Growth In Your Business
A recent interviewee gave me this statement. It matches so well with what I have been writing on lately (outside of here) that I can only believe that I heard it and subconsciously started chewing on it. It’s a great statement from someone who took a company from 1-2% annual growth for seven years to double digit growth in one. …
Controlling Language Doesn’t Motivate People to Follow the Rules
How you set limits to others and to yourself (along with your personal interpretation of the limit setting) determines whether your motivation comes from within and works or comes from without and destroys enthusiasm.
Cognitive Dissonance & Change
I recently completed the following article that defines the concepts of dissonance and consonance and their significance in the process of change. Cognitive Dissonance Theory for Inspiring Social Change
InformIT’s “Breaking the Mold: Preparing Your Company for Innovation and Change”
InformIT has a sample chapter from SCORE!: A Better Way to Do Busine$$: Moving from Conflict to Collaboration by Thomas Stallkamp. The chapter discusses a case at Chrysler where the management team did not follow the herd with some bully business practices.
Change Symbolism
As the weekend of April 2nd & 3rd concludes most of us will have heard something about the pope’s passing, and his leadership of the catholic church, over the past quarter century. Without opening the door to debate on the merits of one set of religious beliefs or another there are some lessons regarding leadership effectiveness that might be gleaned …
Setting Context & The Burning Platform
When we set forth to assign a task to an individual the significance of context is too often underestimated. Agreed that those tasks that are routine and repetitive in nature require very little in terms of relevant context beyond that applied when the task was first assigned, unless of course something significant has changed. Context assists in the assignment of …
High Adaptability Factor and Over-Stratum
In his discussions of building dams with the Navajo as a young white man in the 1930s (West of th Thirties), E.T. Hall describes how he had to adapt to the ways that were culturally acceptable to the them. As a white manager, and as a young man, he started off coming onto the site noisily, slamming the car door …
Knowledge Sharing
An article by James Roberson (“CMb 2004–16: ‘Knowledge sharing’ should be avoided“) got me thinking about the problems inherent in the dictive to share knowledge. You know what happens: the boss, who is too small to be your real boss even though he’s your boss’s boss, gathers everyone together and points out that y’all missed some great opportunities because what …
On Implementation
I’m getting more curious about issues of implementation. I admit that I’ve been more in the theoretical sphere, or simply more curious what it means for individuals within organizations. It’s obvious that implementation has several issues coming along with it, the most important being the same as for any change effort: we still have to get widgets out the door …