All I really need to know I learned from Dr. Seuss. With apologies to Robert Fulghum, Dr. Seuss has more life-long lessons than kindergarten. Here are some of my favorites: The best way to learn and expand your horizons is to try new things. I do not like green eggs and ham! I do not…
When I first got into business, the HR manager asked me a series of informal questions which claimed to test my suitability for corporate life. As I recall, I didn’t do so well on the quiz but I’ve still managed to figure out the corporate gig. I recently came across the questions and started using…
No, this isn’t some new comic from Scott Adams about Dilbert interacting with Donald Trump – although I’m laughing about the possibilities. Instead it’s a central tenet of Adams’ most recent book titled How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big. Adams relies on his trademark humor to describe “the strategies he has…
During my career, I’ve run a variety of group exercises designed to identify ways we could improve group performance. Typically my teams can identify areas of improvement but believe the challenges are with other people, not themselves. They suffer from the bias blind spot. The bias blind spot is the cognitive bias of failing to…
A year after blogging that Halloween metrics can be scary, there is some good news from the National Retail Federation. The NRF reports that American consumers will spend an average of $66.28 on Halloween in 2010, up from last year’s $56.31 and about the same as 2007 and 2008. Even though Halloween didn’t become a commercial…
After poking fun at Marketing, several people forwarded me this classic joke about the communication issues between Marketing and Engineering: A man is flying in a hot air balloon and realizes he is lost. He reduces his altitude and spots a man down below. He lowers the balloon further and shouts, “Excuse me. Can you…
At the end of every month, I review my most popular posts from the last 90 days. In Q2 Dilbert on Risk Management showed up in the top 5 for the first time:The surge in popularity is interesting but I’m not sure that it’s reliable, especially since Google Trends doesn’t show the same pattern. Regardless, risk…
It’s pretty common for people (and Dilbert) to poke fun at Marketing. The jokes typically come in three flavors: 1. Product Marketing and Public Relations often have amusing conversations as we try to describe products in colorful, but believable, ways. 2. Marketing sometimes has to use a little artistic license to get people interested in…
One last parting shot on MBOs and the proliferation of goals: Note to all vendors of software packages that support goal tracking (including my employer): It’s only a joke. I do know that there’s value in using technology to solve these problems.
“It’s clear that Wilson’s the only person here who reads my blog.” This Paul Wood comic, which appeared in Harvard Business Online, got me thinking again about the nature of manager blogs. As I posted before, if a manager is going to write a blog, the manager should write it themselves. But should the manager’s employees read it?…