What’s with all of the ice? The question bothered me after a recent trip to Whole Foods Market, an upscale market near my home. The container of hummus I bought hadn’t been refrigerated; it was displayed in a large barrel of ice. In fact, lots of other food and drinks items were stored in ice barrels…
This weekend’s Wall Street Journal contained an article by former Chrysler and General Motors executive Bob Lutz called “Life Lessons from a Car Guy.” Lutz believes that different kinds of organizations require different kinds of leaders. A loosely-connected conglomerate like General Electric requires a leader with vision and portfolio management skills; investing/divesting lines of business,…
Sometimes you have to think outside the camel. At a recent management offsite, I adopted the phrase “Think different, act different” as a rallying cry for the team. I was trying to emphasize the dangers of group think so I reminded them of the story of ten monkeys in the cage. I didn’t just want…
A little more than six months ago, I took a new role with a group that was described as in need of a “turn-around” and an “updated strategy and direction”. I was urged to introduce a new mission/vision, strategic objectives, and revised key performance indicators. Given my performance management background, this seemed like a reasonable…
I’m not sure how it happened, but one morning I woke up and “alignment” had turned into a dirty word treated with the same disdain as other corporate buzzwords such as synergy, paradigm shift, and collaboration. I hear executives going out of their way to disparage the word. Alignment is much maligned. Given that this…
Why is change management so hard? I believe it’s because most humans fear the unknown. Change jeopardizes daily routines, modifies inter-personal relationships, and – most of all – forces us to deal with the unknown. The classic Who Moved My Cheese? tells the story of four creatures in a maze and how they react when their…
During the holidays, I had the chance to re-read one of my favorite marketing books: The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing by Ries and Trout. While many people seem to think that the book is no longer relevant, I was more than a little surprised by how of much of the book I remembered and…
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.”…
If you’re not in software development, you may not be familiar with an agile software development framework called scrum. Scrum is an alternative to the traditional waterfall approach and attempts to simplify complex projects by structuring them in short cycles of work called sprints. Each sprint is based on prioritized customer requirements such that the highest value features…
In a McKinsey Quarterly article entitled “Management lessons from the financial crisis,” UCLA business professor Richard Rumelt coins the term smooth-sailing fallacy: This smooth-sailing fallacy arises when we mistake a measure for reality. Competent management always looks deeper than the numbers, deeper than the current measures. Incompetent management just focuses on the metrics, on the body…