Inspired by reading the Happiness Project by Gretchen Rubin, I asked a series of questions on Friday about workplace happiness. I used happiness as a shortcut word for a place where people can be fully alive and thrive. Too many organizations still do strategy in the corner offices and innovation in a specific department as [...]
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.
To Leaders Afraid of Twitter
What would you say to the Leader who says “we just shouldn’t be that transparent” or “being transparent in the marketplace will ruin our competitive advantage”? Pam Fox Rollin asked me that question in our recent podcast. Besides “that’s bullshit”, I thought? Alas, I did not let my inside voice become my outside voice, but [...]
The New How: Business Solutions Through Collaborative Strategy
For years now, our clients have let us build a different kind of strategy with them. They’ve let us not only catalyze and define the big idea, but they let us work with them to translate that big idea into a plan and approach that everyone buys into and ultimately makes real.
Flat is the New Black
Ever wonder why big organizations act so darn slow? It’s not because of size alone. It’s because our modern day organizations are designed and optimized for the “what is” rather than enabling a kind of velocity to be perpetually self-reinventing. Most big organizations focus on the positions and titles, and with only a few people [...]
Reinvention of Work
Usually at TED, people talk about success. I’m going to talk about why companies fail and specifically why the old rules — those that once made companies powerful — no longer work. The best way for me to do this is with 2 examples. A company I was recently working with needed a new product [...]
The New How Video
Click to play…an overview of The New How.
Za Book Title
Many people have helped me pick the title of my new book in contributing ideas or reviewing options. It seemed only fair to update you now that we’ve made the decision. (in this case, we means the great team at O’Reilly and myself). The book is about a way to do collaborative strategy within firms. [...]
Open Letter to Carol Bartz, Yahoo
Congrats on your new role. For many of us in the tech industry, Yahoo is more than a company, it’s a Silicon Valley icon. By putting in the kind of strong management you represent, I hope the board is signaling the company’s intent to reinvent itself and thrive once again. Your opportunities speak to opportunities for every tech firm, so we’re going to make this an Open Letter in the hope that everyone can learn from the experience you’re about to have.
Creating Velocity thru Strategy
What should you do? Do you stop things? Start things? Answer: yes, to both. Of course you should rethink and reevaluate but if you do that for long you put at risk the current business or effort simply because you didn’t execute what you could have done.
Hope is Not A Strategy
Executives at the helm of companies from small firms to large enterprises spend much of their time thinking about how to drive growth. But putting those thoughts into action can challenge even the most seasoned leader. Often executives focus on the “what” of strategy at the expense of the “how” — neglecting the “how” makes success a long shot.