Blog Yes & Know

Performance vs. Behavior

We’re schooled, whether through B-school or working in organizations, in the outer trappings of success – status, money, title and so forth. How do we tie that to individual satisfaction …

Employees and Strategy

For many executives, the two words above don’t go together. Why? Because they think strategy is done in the C-suite. I’m here to tell you that’s old thinking. Life is …

Five Dysfunctions of Teams

I got assigned this book in grad school and probably rolled  my eyes at the time. The idea that team dynamics could be captured in 5 dysfunctions! Heck, I could …

Carly Fiorina: Tough Choices

Carly 2.0 was released this week. Carly Fiorina, the former CEO of HP, is on tour for her book, Tough Choices. Yesterday, I went. Are you surprised I went? I …

What is this Strategy thing?

Because all the “right” strategies in the world could be applied to any business but what makes it right for them is really about leveraging their core strengths today. So it’s about discernment certainly to figure out what is a company’s strength today. And what are they clearly not able to do. And then to look at that clearly, without bias to think about what makes sense. I suppose in some way it’s the role of a parent to a child or a teacher to a student. The parent or teacher sees things the child or student doesn’t. Not because the child is stupid or the student ignorant, but both are learning and are too close to the situation themselves to have some perspective of what true gifts / strengths / abilities they should place their leverage.

Whole Foods And Trust

Whole Foods learned the wrong lesson from its misuse of online forums.

Employees Co-Create Brand

A bunch of writing has been done by myself and others about how “consumers now co-create the brand”. But what about employees? Are they co-creators, too? Many, many fortune 1000 …

Even Steinways Get Out of Tune

What’s the difference between an ethical leader and a business leader? Are they mutually exclusive, a subset of each other, or one and the same?
Like the best Steinway can get out of tune, we humans can get slightly off kilter in small ways. The many decisions that lead to “right or wrong” are often more like shades of grey or unclear forks in the road. Ethics are fundamentally about a set of gradual and subtle decisions that lead to a larger impact.
What can people can put into place to make perhaps better decisions? We can move from being experts on facts and novices on values to experts on values, and students of fact.