I travel often enough that when people ask me where I’m based, I sometimes joke “Seat 4F.” I’ve been able to observe a lot of passengers boarding planes. Based on what I’ve seen, how we board airplanes doesn’t work very well. And based on what I’ve read, it doesn’t make sense either. All U.S. airlines…
With the arrival of the holiday season comes the inevitable onslaught of television classics, including A Christmas Carol and How the Grinch Stole Christmas. While each are good movies in their own right, I wonder if the latter became a holiday staple largely based on the sheer number of times it has aired. Familiarity breeds…
We are all faced with a series of great opportunities – brilliantly disguised as insoluble problems. February 16 is the anniversary of the death of John William Gardner, the author of that quote. Gardner was Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare in the late 1960’s, founder of two influential U.S. organizations (Common Cause and Independent…
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…
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…
Performance management vendors often say adopting their tools must be done all at once, starting at the top of the organization. They argue that, without executive buy-in, a performance management deployment will not have the mandate needed to succeed. Furthermore, the argument continues, without an enterprise data warehouse and reporting tools deployed to every desktop, employees…
Do you need an informal way to convince your coworkers that your organization could benefit from performance management? That the principles of managing by walking around could improve your organization’s alignment? Here’s a poem that was written more than 150 years ago that might help: The Blind Men and The Elephant John Godfrey Saxe (1816-1887)…