The morning coffee break had wrapped up and we were back at it, involved in a deep discussion. Some people were at the whiteboard, some debating one another, and some listening attentively as we batted an issue around the room. The door to the conference room swung open and it seemed that a new member [...]
Archive | Culture & Leadership
Collaboration — the ability to co-labor — towards a shared goal is a purposeful way of engaging many people and their ideas to achieve a shared vision.
Curating Greatness
The engineers who become CEO do so because they’re artists of technology. The marketers because they’re sculptors of identity. The finance guys because they’re maestros of money, conductors of cash. Recruiting and HR roles lead when they are Curators of greatness, enabling people to come together to co-create outstanding business performances. Sure, HR is charged [...]
The Success Equation
Human stuff — the soft stuff — is rarely valued. We talk about it, sure. But we don’t change it. We don’t reinvent it. We give lip service to it but, when times are tough, we focus on the hard stuff. We manage numbers because it’s easier. We say we value people but we focus [...]
People Are Not Cogs
Every day I go to meetings where language suggests people are cogs. With peers in a few CEO roundtables, I’ve heard things like: “I plan on hiring 3 biz dev people to get $345K per headcount in revenues.” After publishing a book about closing the execution gap by focusing on the “peopley” stuff, CEOs of [...]
The Why Of Meetings
Let me just say what all of us believe: meetings suck. Yet we’re all going to meetings. For most of us, meetings get in the way of us getting actual work done. Often, meetings are not helping us move the ball forward. Even though brilliant folks like Gina Trapani and Chris Brogan have talked about [...]
42 Rules No one Told You.
I’ve been wanting to find a way to share with you books worth reading. Finally, I’ve settled on doing an interview. I’ve asked Pam Fox Rollin, a coach and leadership expert, & the new author of 42 Rules for Your New Leadership Role: The Manual They Didn’t Hand You When You Made VP, Director, or [...]
It’s Not Bragging if You Back It Up
If Sunday’s night news taught us nothing else, it was a reminder of how you behave when you have a success is as important as how you behave when you’re failing. Do you pump your fists, take credit, and smile a lot when things are going really well? Do you act like a beat puppy [...]
We Can’t Agree to Disagree
If [fill in the person] thinks I’ve bought in, they’re crazy.” “Even if [fill in the group] doesn’t believe in our current vision, they’ll believe when they see it.” “I don’t think [fill in the project] even matters to our customers.” These are not the kinds of comments any of us utter if we know [...]
Culture Trumps Strategy, Every Time
Trust, fights, and child care. When I’m advising start-up teams nowadays, I ask a lot of questions around those three areas. Which makes it sounds more like a marriage counselor’s office, rather than a boardroom, right? Quite often, the teams I’m talking with think culture is some woo-woo stuff that doesn’t make any difference in [...]
Rejecting New Ideas
All innovation starts with ideas. Sure, we talk about innovation as disruptive, or global, or related to market moves, and certainly spread over social media but the universal element of all innovation is this: an idea. And while I think most people like to think of themselves as innovators or at the very least, able [...]