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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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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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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…
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“Super School” Project Challenge: Seven Steps to Re-Inventing High School
The Huffington Post reported recently that Laurene Powell Jobs has pledged $50 million to crowdsource designs for the next American high school. The campaign website, XQ: The Super School Project, makes the case that public high schools have been “frozen in time for the last hundred years while America has gone from the Model T to…
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Four Reasons Why Annual Performance Reviews Fail and What To Do About It
Teague Hopkins on my advisory board flagged this Washington Post story about Accenture throwing out most of its current process for doing annual performance reviews (APRs) and rankings for employees. With 330,000 employees, Accenture figured that since the process wasn’t actually improving performance and it was costing huge amounts of time and money, it was time…
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Transparency is a Great Way to Start Growing a Company Culture, But It’s Only a Start
What does transparency mean in the context of growing a company culture? A high degree of transparency means that how the company operates is visible to all employees and in some cases to customers and stakeholders. Transparency means that not only can people see our results, but how they were achieved. They can “see through” the surface…
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What Do You Do If Your Boss Manages Straight Up?
An effective manager has to manage tasks and relationships in all directions. Even if the organizational structure is relatively flat, good managers manage up, down, and across the organization. They develop good working relationships with their own staff, their boss(es), and their peers. Most managers have difficulty finding the right balance. So sooner or later…
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Don’t Accept the Defaults! What Are You Doing to Customize Your Life?
Most technology is designed to be “feature rich.” This means that there are multiple menus and multiple ways to do everything. In short, it means you won’t use 80% of the capabilities and it would take forever to figure them out anyway. The way most designers deal with the “feature rich” problem is that they…