Three different perspectives on how to talk with or present to senior executives: 1) John Baldoni uses the following tips for Making Small Talk With Bigwigs: Do your homeworkFind out what the executive cares about ahead of time; for example, don’t focus on profits if growth is on the agenda. Be yourselfWhile some formality is needed,…
Years ago, I took a class called “Managing With Influence” from Jeffrey Pfeffer, professor of organizational behavior at Stanford University and author of the book subtitled “Profiting from Evidence-Based Management.” During the class, Professor Pfeffer claimed layoffs do not improve financial performance – except in the very short term. He based this on a careful analysis of…
In the Upside of the Downturn, Geoff Colvin suggests death rates go down in a recession. Regardless of the accuracy of the claim, it’s worth remembering the recession provides new opportunities for companies willing to take risks. To emphasize this point, Colvin subtitled his book “Ten Management Strategies to Prevail in the Recession and Thrive in the Aftermath.”…
After last week’s post, Scrum By Walking Around, a reader emailed to ask if I knew the the origins of the phrase management by walking around (MBWA). Rather than replying immediately based on what I believed, I spent a fair amount of time doing Web research but the results were inconclusive. Most sources credit the Hewlett-Packard culture for…
A few more of my favorite performance management quotes: It is an immutable law in business that words are words, explanations are explanations, promises are promises—but only performance is reality. Harold S. Geneen, 1910-1997, communications executive The man who starts out going nowhere, generally gets there. Dale Carnegie, 1888-1955, author and pioneer in self-improvement and…
Throwing down the blogging gauntlet, Michael asks a simple – but provocative – question: How would […] you define Performance Management and what does it mean when it is successfully implemented? My initial reaction was to borrow a phrase from Justice Potter Stewart: I’m not sure I can define performance management, but I know it when I…
Over the last decade, the number of women-owned businesses grew at nearly twice the rate of all U.S. firms. Despite this good news, the statistics about women as business leaders are disheartening. Only 2.6% of Fortune 500 companies are run by women. Only 16% of the House and Senate members are women. (Even worse, seven of…
My previous company used the slogan ‘aligning execution with strategy’ to emphasize that often what companies do (their execution) often doesn’t match what they say they want to do (their strategy). The phrase became so common among employees, partners, and customers that we would sometimes slip up and say ‘aligning strategy with execution.’ When that happened, I would often…
At last week’s meeting of the CMO Community, a representative of the executive search consulting firm Spencer Stuart mentioned that the average tenure for Chief Marketing Officers at U.S. companies is 28 months, up five months from 2006. Great news, I thought, given my current role. However, remembering the earlier confusion on CFO tenure, I decided to do some fact…
On the heels of writing about prioritizing by what’s urgent rather than important, an article in Management-Issues reminds me we also have to worry about prioritization based on who yells the loudest. The article quotes a U.C. Berkeley study which showed outspoken people were judged as possessing higher levels of general intelligence, regardless of their…