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No Teamwork? Or Is There Is No Work for Teams?
A common refrain in the business world is that “we need more teamwork.” I am not so sure. Sports analogies are probably the most common source of metaphors in the business language. Think about it: he struck out, do we have our bases covered, it’s a whole new ball game, that came out of left field, you’re…
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Strategy Is About Making Choices, Not Just Decisions
Strategy is about making choices among realistic options to use your resources to achieve a business goal. A good way to test whether you have a strategy is whether you can point to the options you have chosen between or among and explain why you made the choice you did. For example, “We are choosing…
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Ten Thousand Hours and Ten-Minute YouTube Videos
If you invested 10,000 hours learning how to learn, you might be better than average at a lot of things. In his bestseller, Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell sets out his interpretation of data which seem to show that the success of top performers in many fields is better explained by fortunate opportunities to get more practice…
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Make Your “not going to do it anymore” List
There is some combination of sun angle, crisp blue sky, football games on TV, and other signals of fall that triggers in me an epigenetic response that it is time to start learning again. School is now in session. No matter how long it has been since you sat in the classroom, there is that…
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Touch the Rope
An occupational hazard of being a management and business coach used to be that I was asked to provide or participate in team building exercises with teams I was coaching. For a while, the fad was team building in the wilderness on a “ropes course” where the team would be confronted by various challenges. You’ve…