I recently sat next to well-dressed, articulate, successful guy on an airplane. He was an oral surgeon who had emigrated from India to England and then later to the United States. While the work required for re certification in his profession was immense as was building a practice several times, he had “made it.” He […]
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 […]
A recent article in The Wall Street Journal* extolled the virtues of good followership, pointing out that not everyone can be in charge. I agree, although I think good following is much more than the one example the article cites — speaking up when your boss is wrong. My experience, however, is that good followers […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
“ … 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 […]
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 […]
I was shaving blind the other day in a hotel room after forgetting to replenish my travel-size shaving cream. I made do with some hair conditioner, which has the appropriate friction coefficient, but because it is virtually colorless, you can’t see which parts of your face you have shaved and which you have missed, you […]