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Twelve Days of Budget Cuts and a Crow in a Dead Elm Tree (Partridges and Pears Were Too Expensive)
Keeping with the spirit of the season (by which we mean the end of the fiscal year, not the holidays), here is a list of twelve phrases you will want to watch out for as your organization starts talking about the budget for 2020. Any of these may mean someone is about to cut your…
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Three Secrets to Thriving in an Organizational Matrix
First, recognize that almost all medium to large organizations are actually matrix organizations. Most of these organizations have a direct “vertical” reporting line based on one organizational dimension and at least one “horizontal” based on another dimension. Sometimes the formal vertical is a function like development, production, marketing, sales, etc. Sometimes it’s geographical or line…
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Disruptive Technologies Create New Growth Opportunities for Your Professional Services Business
New technologies can help professional services businesses to grow their business beyond billing hours of one-to-one client services. The one-to-one service model has dominated the professional service industry for years and the value proposition has been built around a richly personalized one-to-one real-time interaction. Like everything these days, technology has disrupted this model and created…
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Finding the Balance Between Modern Convenience, Self-Reliance, and Community
Surviving and thriving at work requires some balance between your work life and the rest of your life beyond the job. But even your life beyond work may need some balancing of modern convenience, self-reliance, and community. I’ve been reading several good novels set in rural America of the early 20th century and I am…
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Prepare for Perpetual Technology Upgrade Mode: Lifetime Learning With an Attitude
Do you find yourself spending more and more time trying to keep up with the constant stream of technology upgrades and the fallout they create? I do. Here’s a small sampling from last week. I finally upgraded my Mac operating system because it is supposed to be “more secure.” In the process, the OS upgrade “broke”…
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The Sportification of Politics and the Possibility of Governing
Things have changed in the political arena. That’s the unavoidable conclusion we have to draw from the last year. No matter who or what you voted for, one thing we might be able to agree on is that things have changed. There are, to be sure, a number of troubling trends. The role of a…
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Four Secrets to Successful Business Marketing Strategy
1. Test the market early and often. Before you invest too much in a product or service, you need to find out if people actually want it. Seems obvious, but it’s amazing how often businesses skip this step. I was waiting at a traffic light the other day and I saw this yellow sign about a foot…
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It’s Time For You to Think About Hiring Four-Dimensional People
One of my posts from a few years ago keeps re-surfacing and in discussing it with someone a few days ago, I decided I should update it. In the original post, I made the case that you should hire three-dimensional people who have depth, breadth, and length. I am not a fan of the prevailing…
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Evil Geniuses Win $6.6 Million Playing Video Games: eSports May Be Good for You
The prevailing parental narrative about video games is that they are likely to be an anti-social addictive waste of time or, at best, mind-numbing entertainment. It might be time to reconsider that narrative. Imagine an arena with tens of thousands of fans and millions watching online cheering for their favorite team in a team-based video…
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The Power of Persistently Pointless Processes: Have You Balanced Your Checkbook Lately?
Technology historians routinely point to examples of legacy hardware design driving new products in odd ways. This “path dependence” is often cited as a barrier to innovation and the cause of long-term inefficiency. The layout of the letters on your keyboard is a common example. This so-called QWERTY keyboard layout originally designed for typewriters is…