The next time someone comes into your office or cube and asks you to solve a problem, do this instead: Look at them in the eye. Then ask ‘em, “what do you think?”. Then wait. Don’t take the problem on. Don’t assume that because they have come to you, you should solve the problem. Cause [...]
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.
Never Gender, Rank, Title
My son is reading Harry Potter and is literally devouring it. Soon, I’m thinking, he’ll reach Book 4, which poses a little problem. Not to be a spoiler or anything in case you haven’t read it, bad things happen to good people in Book 4. So as a parent, I’m thinking about what to do [...]
EA’s Collaboration for Growth
The gaming industry certainly has been getting a lot of attention, especially with new entrants like Zynga creating wide-spread buzz and adoption. Add to that the iPAD and mobile gaming phenomena, and you know that traditional style game companies have to be thinking about how to compete in this new landscape. The execs at EA [...]
Conviction vs. Courage
Which leader are you: the one with conviction or the one with courage? All our lives, we are taught that leaders are compelling people who create confidence and belief just by the way they stand tall, direct towards a vision, and show conviction. We will, the thinking goes, follow that leader to the ends of [...]
Apple’s Startup Culture
At the recent All Things D conference, Steve Jobs described Apple’s (AAPL) culture as “that of a startup.” Why? Is it because he is nostalgic, yearning to rebuild the company he founded nearly 35 years ago? Is he reflecting a passion for the innovation and entrepreneurship so often inherent in startups? Or is he saying [...]
3 Ways Activate Imaginauts
A good friend of mine and fellow CEO, Glen Lubbert, recently asked me the question about how to get his whole organization thriving, growing, and more innovative. We were hiking St. Joseph’s hill on what turned out to be an adventuresome hail-filled day in Los Gatos, and talking about growth strategies for his firm, Mojo [...]
3 Ways: Know You’re A Start-Up
Culture has to be one of the most popular topics, yet analytically hard to quantify. It thus gets relegated to the “soft stuff” because there is little evidence-based research supporting how to create a viable culture, what a good culture is, etc. And perhaps a high-performance culture is a little like the often quote about [...]
Same Approach, Same Results
Company leaders often say to me “we need to innovate faster” and we need to increase our yield of ideas to market. It’s a core area of competitiveness. But what is interesting to me is that their emphasis on this is often how many talented engineers they have, and how may patents they file, and [...]
Be a Better CEO
Dear Leader, You say you want all of us within the company to innovate. But you haven’t enabled us to do so. You need to work with us so we all get a shared understanding of what matters. This sets the stage for a meritocracy of ideas and also enables us to adapt quickly when [...]
Where is our DEMING for HR?
Okay, I admit it. I give a shit about people. And so do you. Sometimes you think you really only care about outcomes like stock prices and liquidity moves, and exit strategies and all that. But you also know that if you engage people early, you’ll get that elusive thing of “buy-in” in such [...]