The Desk ought to be a wonderfully powerful productivity engine. It is the most common office standard. Whether Executive corner office or lowly boiler room cubicle, nearly every white collar workplace, and most blue collar places, have a desk of some sort. Unfortunately, the desk fails to live up to its promise. It seems to [...]
Magnetic Poetry: a problem statement A-ha!
July 27, 2010 By 2 Comments
Shuffling the pieces around creates new statements. Back in April of this year, when I started to develop this blog, I wrote a series of posts on Elephant Biting. The concept behind these posts was simple: You can’t take on an entire, big problem all at once. Those problems need to be handled little by [...]
Insecurity secures the status quo.
July 26, 2010 By 1 Comment
I had a conversation recently with someone in a senior position within his department. He was lamenting, yet accepting, that his job kept him very busy (60-80 hours a week). I casually asked what work they were doing, and quickly noticed some circularity of reasoning that, if further explored, might have been able to reveal [...]
Caesar was right, but where do we find competent leaders?
July 14, 2010 By 4 Comments
The soldier has a right to competent command. — Julius Caesar When applied to the workplace, this quote speaks directly to the need for leaders who are actually capable of leadership, of course. Yet, many organizations employ methods of promoting individuals into leadership roles do little to take into account the person’s leadership skills. Instead, [...]
Change Management and the 5S Framework
July 12, 2010 By 7 Comments
A couple weeks ago, I wrote a post about Rube Goldberg Leadership, in which I related management and leadership practices to the 7 Wastes concept found in Lean thinking. That proved to be a fairly popular post by my modest standards, so I thought I’d take another swing at relating some more intangible activities to [...]
Best of MFP: My Greatest Teachers: 5 Lessons for Everyone
July 8, 2010 By 5 Comments
Best of MFP: Rube Goldberg Leadership: Waste and Value
June 30, 2010 By 10 Comments
Each and every day, we encounter phrases that express the difficulty with which work gets done. We talk about jumping through hoops, herding cats, or (egads!) pulling teeth. All of these phrases express a frustration with the woeful inefficiency we must deal with in order to unravel contradictory policies, unclear direction, internal political competitions and [...]
Leadership and Management Effectiveness: Training the Bear (Literally)
June 28, 2010 By 1 Comment
So, I’m getting caught up after a family vacation to New Hampshire’s Mount Washington Valley. Among the amusement parks, water slides, train rides, over-excited children, over-tired parents, souvenirs, and ice cream sundaes, I came across one of the most amazing examples of effectively managing another’s performance I’ve ever seen. About 200 or more people gathered [...]
The Problem is Knowing What the Problem is.
June 21, 2010 By 2 Comments
Often, when talking to managers about some challenge they are facing, I’ll get a brief history of what they are dealing with, including what was done by the last manger(s) and what inititaive(s) were tried in the past, with little or no success. Sometimes, they’ll even go on at length about exactly what was done, [...]
Positive Deviance: Transformation’s Fuel?
June 18, 2010 By 8 Comments
I Attended a presentation tonight from the Positive Deviance Initiative. According to their website: The Positive Deviance Initiative (PDI) is a network organization which is dedicated to amplifying the use of the Positive Deviance (PD) approach to enable communities worldwide to solve seemingly “intractable” problems which require behavioral and social change. While most of the [...]
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