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What Your Old Computer Can Teach You About the Importance of Taking a Vacation
It’s August here in Washington, which means it’s prime vacation time. I am guessing you have earned some time away from work. So take it! If you think you don’t deserve it, here’s a benchmark. The US Congress has done nothing to deserve a vacation at all and they are taking five weeks right now. […]
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Three Keys to Managing People and Risk That I Learned From Teaching Au Pairs to Drive
There is no perfect solution to childcare. There are all kinds of childcare options with various trade-offs in convenience, stress, and guilt. Anyone who has peeled a clinging child off of their legs at the door of the daycare center while other parents looked on with a mix of empathy and fear knows what I mean. […]
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Three Keys to the Successful Launch of a New Employee that I Learned Baling Hay
Mr. Lemmel was my first manager. I was a suburban kid working as a farm hand for the summer. On my first day, he needed me to help bale hay. He drove a tractor over to his gas pump to fill up the tank for the day. Then he told me to sit in the […]
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Five Reasons Your Company Is Addicted to Reorganization and How to Survive the Next One
Some companies seem to be in a constant state of reorganization. It’s almost an addiction. If you want to survive reorganizations, you need to be a bridge not a box. More on this in a minute, but first, it helps to understand why companies reorganize so often? 1. Modern enterprises tend to describe themselves in […]
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Confronting the Near Enemy: Is One Emotion Masquerading as Another?
One of the reasons I like reading fiction is that every now and then, an author will sneak a wonderful bit of wisdom into a story that grabs me in a way that is much more memorable than if I had read it in a textbook or journal article. Usually when I discover such a passage, […]
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Is Your Market Going to be Uberfied or AirBnB’d? Disruptive Innovations Coming Your Way
Uber is a “private car for hire” service which uses a mobile app to handle the whole engagement and payment transaction including rating both drivers and riders. It has the taxi industry trying to set up roadblocks. AirBnB matches up people who want to rent out their apartments (trailers, rooms, etc.) with people looking for […]
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What Am I Missing Here? Five Ways to Make the Invisible Visible
Have you ever been in a meeting where, based on what you see and hear, you expect the meeting to be playing out in one way but instead it is going in another direction entirely? You suspect something is going on beneath the surface and that you are missing something important that would make sense of […]
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Great Teams Are Worth Watching, Learn Their Secret and Pass It On!
I am a big fan of the perfect pass. If you follow professional basketball in the US, you were treated to some perfect passing last week. In a pivotal game in the championship series, the Spurs passed the ball 113 times more than the Heat. Especially at the professional level, the teams tend to rely […]
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First Three Steps on the Road to Becoming an Expert Manager of Experts
Since most of us are experts in only a few areas, it would seem that one of those areas ought to be managing other experts. Here are three steps to get you started. Step 1. Learn to respect expertise. We expect others to respect our own expertise, but frequently we don’t seem to respect the expertise […]
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Two Secrets to Discovering the Benefits of the Long View: From Deadlines to Lifelines
One of the most damaging corporate pathologies is the obsession with short term performance at the expense of longer term sustainability. A pervasive symptom of this pathology is the daily game of “Name That Deadline.” Your manager asks, when can I have your report or when will that project be done? You give a date with […]