Ah, meetings. Most of you have a full day of them if you’re in a senior leadership role. Be honest, wouldn’t you rather have a Rottweiler chew on your shin than go to most of them? The fact that you “own” many of them is even more disheartening! Maybe you should cancel them and see […]
Little’s Law says that the amount of work completed is a function of the number of projects and the average time it takes to complete a project. In other words, the line at McDonald’s has 11 people in it and each person takes, on average, 30 seconds to be served, therefore, if you are gal […]
I’m not much of a gardener. The only green thumb I’ve ever been accused of having is when I’ve stuck it in pesto. I’ve noticed, however, that my efforts to have my lawn match my wife’s well cared for flowers are only rewarded when I combine the right amounts of enabling and prohibiting—the right conditions […]
A commonly overlooked element of a highly functional team is shared fate. If you lose while I win, I can’t expect you to support my position. The objective may be clear (“Take that hill!”), but if I have a pile of money at the peak and you have a bag of rocks that you must […]
Do you have school age children? If not now, perhaps in the past? Do you remember those nights when your daughter or son—or perhaps both—had a boatload of homework, not just in one subject but in several on the same night? How did that work for you? If your household is anything like ours was […]
Driving across Wyoming on a recent vacation we saw a house that was held together with more bailing wire and braces than joists and concrete. You could almost see how it got that way. The porch started to sag so they built some temporary stairs a few feet away. It was a slight inconvenience but […]
My definition of organizational effectiveness? Great results with optimal resources over the long haul. There are three components in my definition. Change one of them, and you’re not successful in my book. You can get great results in the short term, and you can even get those results with the wrong number or quality of […]
“There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.” —Peter Drucker Organizational effectiveness requires that people are doing the right things well. Doing the right things poorly is probably an opportunity for coaching. Doing the wrong things well is, as Drucker points out, useless. A colleague and I […]
Common wisdom says that family businesses have an extremely high failure rate when moving from the first to second to third generation, and that’s absolutely true. The numbers often cited state that 30 percent survive the second generation, and it decreases to midteens by the third and single digits by the fourth. What you don’t […]