Tag: Organizational Effectiveness

Confusing Leadership With Mathematics

Leaders are Paid to Make Hard Decisions Henry Kissinger said, “To plan policy on the assumption of the equal possibility of all contingencies is to confuse statesmanship with mathematics.” Let’s change three words to make this a brilliant statement regarding business strategy. “To craft strategy on the assumption of the equal possibility of all contingencies […]

Leading With Knotted Line

Properly diagnose the problem and really “see” the issue Feeling good because my first cast landed a rainbow trout, I confidently tried to cast underneath a low hanging tree and ended up with a tangled mess of flies and line that took 10 minutes to unravel. I’m relatively new to fly-fishing and am amazed (and […]

Optimize For Millennials?

Unless you just crawled out of the primordial ooze, you’ve heard a lot about how you must optimize your business to make millennials happy. Coddling, free time and pet-happy policies are mentioned often. In working with many companies that question what to do about this and observing what does and doesn’t work, I concluded the […]

On Boarding for Executives

Get On Board! Taking The Right Step Onto The Train Years ago, I worked with a large company in which the CEO hired a new senior executive right before a large annual meeting, which was to be his first real introduction to the company. Apparently, little thought was given to how this executive would integrate […]

Dying At Least Twice

My friend Dave and I have something in common: We’ll both die at least twice. Each of us had medical occurrences that caused breath and blood to stop flowing — his very recently, mine when I was a young man. I’d like to keep it to two; the first occurrence wasn’t so fun. Unlike physical […]

Peering Through The Mist: Organizational Culture

“ … organizational culture represents the collective values, beliefs, and principles of organizational members and is a product of such factors as history, product, market, technology, and strategy, type of employees, management style, and national culture. Culture includes the organization’s vision, values, norms, systems, symbols, language, assumptions, beliefs, and habits.” —excerpt from Wikipedia’s definition of […]

Cleaning The Big House

Don’t take cultural change lightly My wife and I recently read articles about Pope Francis publicly tongue-lashing his curia for the extreme office politics it practiced. One of us compared it with the mafia, but I won’t say which because one of us is a practicing Catholic. My wife didn’t ask me, “If the curia […]