In collaboration with author Gary Hamel and the Management Innovation Exchange (The MIX), SAP launched a crowd-source initiative which poses the question: What is the one thing you’d change to help organizations unleash and organize human potential across boundaries? As I was researching my own answer around the notion of “empathy in business”, I found a Washington Post article titled: A New Model…
The 1993 HBR article ‘Customer Intimacy and Other Value Disciplines’ argued every company had to become champions of one of three value disciplines — operational excellence, customer intimacy, or product leadership. Since that book was published, virtually every business meeting I’ve been in has used at least one of these phrases to describe strategy. Value…
I’m behind in my reading. More than 30 unread books are sitting on my office shelves and another one joins their ranks almost every week. In an attempt to break the logjam I opened one somewhat randomly and read this intriguing claim: “You can personally choose to become more successful by adopting five learnable habits, which, in…
Early in my management career, the HR department sent out a single-question survey which asked how satisfied we were with our jobs on a scale of 0 (very unsatisfied) to 4 (highly satisfied). To my surprise, my group had the lowest average score (2.6) in the company. The HR VP predicted a mass exodus and told…
Many popular phrases have their roots in sports. For example, the cliché “there is no ‘i’ in team” comes from the idea a cohesive team of players is more likely to win games than a collection of individual superstars. Players are told to focus on the team’s overall success rather than their individual performance. The…
When you ask someone to do something, be sure to include the statement that they are free to choose to do it or not. Adding this phrase doubles the likelihood they will do it. A detailed analysis of more than 22K subjects in 42 separate psychology studies demonstrates this startling result. The simple act of…
If I was a millennial, I would be annoyed with popular media. Whether they are called Millennials, Digital Natives, or Generation Y, people under the age of 30 are typically portrayed as having unrealistically high expectations for their career and over-inflated sense of their abilities. They are lazy, lack emotional intelligence, and don’t take criticism well. But they…
Possibly because my mantra is ‘words matter’ or that I’ve been writing continuously for many years, I get asked for tips on better writing. For years, I quoted George Orwell’s advice on how to be simple and clear, including my personal favorite: If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out….
I know this will be an unpopular point of view but I’m just going to say it: Brainstorming is a bad idea that usually doesn’t work. Brainstorming advocates claim groups of people are more likely to find solutions to problems than individuals working alone. The idea was popularized in the 1950’s by advertising executive Alex…
Q: What do the Southwest Airlines boarding process and the video game Halo have in common?A: They both rely on swarm intelligence to improve their experience. Swarm intelligence describes the behavior of a population of simple agents whose aggregate behavior exhibits intelligence unknown to the individual agents. Groups exhibiting swarm intelligence have no central leader…