Archive | management by walking around

Strategy shouldn’t be static

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…

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Survival of the loudest

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…

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Speedlinking, May 2009

One part writer’s block and two parts schedule overload means I don’t have time to write an original post.  Speedlinking to the rescue: Over at ‘I Help You Blog’, Philip suggests 101 Great Posting Ideas That Will Make Your Blog Sizzle.  My personal favorite is #101:  Create a post with a 101 ideas. In a relatively…

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Manage by Flying Around

Since the title of this blog is manage by walking around, kudos to Haruka Nishimatsu, the president and CEO of Japan Air. According to a CBS News article, he practices management by walking flying around: “If management is distant, up in the clouds, people just wait for orders,” Nishimatsu told CBS News through a translator….

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Can You Say What Your Strategy Is?

In the Harvard Business Review article Can You Say What Your Strategy Is?, David Collis and Michael Rukstad claim most executives cannot summarize their company’s strategy.  Of course, if executives can’t, no one else in the organization will be able to. And those organizations that don’t understand their strategy are unlikely to execute them successfully. In their words:…

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Wordle for MBWA, 2009 edition

I generated the above word cloud using wordle on my ten most popular posts. For those of you who are not familiar with the concept of word clouds, the clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. While most of the larger words make sense, I’m surprised by the relative…

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My Management Guidelines

Since the title of this blog is “manage by walking around,” I thought I’d share a few examples of how I use that philosophy myself. While there is plenty of debate as to whether there is a difference between managing and leading, I describe myself as a leader rather than a manager. By that, I…

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Management by Marching Around

James Governor sent me an article called Management by Marching Around which reviews the book “No Yelling: The 9 Secrets of Marine Corps Leadership You Must Know to Win in Business.” While I’m amused by the similarity to the title of my own blog, it got me thinking about military analogies in business. When people invoke military…

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