It’s better to correct or prevent problems Organizational effectiveness doesn’t just show up in businesses. 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 […]
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 […]
I’ve been thinking about tariffs as of late. Mostly thinking about them as a blunt instrument. Economics, politics and history would tell us that they are not a very effective way to deal with “inequities”, though certainly they are implemented to try to correct a wrong or even the playing field. If free trade is […]
We need structure to be successful “One of our most dysfunctional beliefs is our contempt for simplicity and structure.” —Marshall Goldsmith Why can Warren Buffett repeatedly make successful multibillion dollar investments with little due diligence and a corporate staff the size of a family meal at my house while many hedge funds have legions […]
Startups pine for profits, predictable cash flow, a sustainable competitive advantage, and the personal wealth and comfort that come from success. Not many will get there. The ones that do are mostly deserving of all those accoutrements previously mentioned. The leaders of that organization toiled and stressed and made do and sacrificed a great deal […]
For the CEO of a company with a fiduciary board (as opposed to an advisory board), there’s perhaps nothing more complex than developing a healthy, mutually satisfying relationship with the board. I’ve been on numerous boards, worked for a few and observed many management-board relationships up close and personal. Few of them work on the […]
I’ve been thinking a lot about democracy and capitalism recently so thought that I’d share a few interesting quotes—some of them conflicting messages—from some very bright fellows to whom I looked for guidance. Before you read them, please ponder this quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald, “The test of a first rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in […]
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 […]
I got hooked on bike racing many years ago when I watched American Greg LeMond beat Frenchman Laurent Fignon on the last stage of the Tour de France by a mere eight seconds after two weeks and 2,041 miles of racing. Later, I was a big Lance Armstrong fan. There has always been a king […]