Tag Archives | failure

Courage Does Not Roar

By on December 8, 2011 in Entrepreneurship, The Personal Story

Today, I was in a room full of remarkable people, making a list of what qualities make someone remarkable. The predictable elements were listed: Hard-working Resourceful Creative Intelligent/ Smart Organized… After 15 or so elements were listed on the post-it board… courageous was added to the list. When you are courageous (or fearless, bold – [...]

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Is Success Predictable?

By on October 10, 2011 in Culture & Leadership

So many teams fail in growth. They blame their strategy, or their tactics, or the market, or bring up some issue about product/market/timing fit was off, or that some people failed at execution and so on. The list of reasons is almost endless for any team. As often as this happens, don’t you wonder if [...]

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5 Ways to Take Advice

By on August 23, 2011 in Entrepreneurship

“What do you do?” When I was starting a consulting company called Rubicon back in 1999, my nephew wanted to know what I did for a living. Having just finished running a division of a company where I was responsible for setting and delivering on a specific measurable result, I noticed I was having a [...]

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First Days

By on August 22, 2011 in Entrepreneurship

The walk to school this crisp morning involved little girls dressed in some very stylish ballerina-style sequined skirts, incredibly crisp white shirts with clean new shoes, and a palpable exuberance. Kids who were grunting at each other at the end of last year were hugging with joy at their reunion. But besides those few moments, [...]

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The Excuses

By on August 12, 2011 in Culture & Leadership, Featured

When I was getting divorced from my first husband, I spent many months reliving the past. These mental hamster-wheel moments were accompanied by sleepless nights, too much scotch, and – to complete this picture in all it’s transparency—family-size bags of Lays BBQ potato chips. During these long nights, I would try and re-imagine each crucial [...]

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Being Imperfectly Ourselves

By on April 20, 2011 in Entrepreneurship, The Personal Story

I sometimes wish I was a Harvard graduate, that I was a 4.0 type student, that I could still do a mean regression analysis, that I had been a CEO of a major corporate company, and was already being called as a corporate director on boards like Nike, Nordstrom, or Amazon. But I’m not. I [...]

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Why I’m Glad I Got Fired

By on March 17, 2011 in Culture & Leadership, The Personal Story

I came to be an expert on collaboration because Carol Bartz both hired me and fired me — within 18 months. Here’s what happened. A friend of mine, Godfrey Sullivan, asked me to consider running the operations for the Americas unit at Autodesk. Only sheer politeness kept me from hanging up. Autodesk? Yep. That CAD [...]

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6 Ways to Change Business

By on January 25, 2010 in Culture & Leadership, Featured

The consistent question asked from any audience and group I work with is…. For us to do this high-performance collaborative work: Don’t the leaders have to change their approach? And, don’t the individual contributors have to change to step up to the game? But these questions are never asked together — meaning, individuals ask “don’t [...]

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Avoiding Strategic Failure

By on September 17, 2008 in Culture & Leadership, Featured

I’ve watched strategy being developed within companies like Adobe, Apple, Autodesk, and Nokia. I’ve seen strategy created by individuals. I’ve seen the big suits of Bain and McKinsey at work. I’ve seen it done well, and occasionally I’ve seen it done poorly. Having read more than 100 books that define the best thinking on strategy, I’ve noticed that following the existing methods often doesn’t yield success.
It’s not just the methodology. Here are five reasons strategy fails in businesses:

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