This article and the video it prefaces drove one of the personal breakthroughs I had after I quit working at a very large online travel company. What I took away from this was: I am not the smartest person in the room. Just get over it. The best results from a group of smart people […]
Summary: Executive participation is required to make strategy-based initiatives happen successfully, and without it the strategy will be hobbled or blocked completely. In other words, you cannot be a hands off executive if you want to see your strategy succeed. Something that really caught my attention in the past has been the fast and loose […]
Wait, what? Did you hear a “No” in your group? Is that person saying “no” a negative person who will drag the rest of your team down and infect them with doubt? Maybe your team will turn on that person, and burn them out of the picture. It happens all the time. Lots of leaders refuse […]
This is a really important set of discoveries about how we think. The recommendations also fly in the face of many a manager’s personal philosophies. When you, “must be able to manage multiple competing priorities”, then you will only succeed if you insist on serializing that workload as much as you can. Why the modern world […]
This article – How to debunk false beliefs without having it backfire – Vox. The fundamental guidance here is to – “Affirm that they’re not idiots… [so] that they don’t feel attacked” – I’ll add that you can never convince anyone of anything by treating them like idiots, let alone your sponsors “… you can avoid […]
I just went through a day of information gathering to see what this SAFe thing was all about and have come away with real, actionable, well balanced knowledge about large scale digital work management. The Scaled Agile Framework is just that, a framework, and like ITIL should only be used as a framework to start […]
It’s all about a phenomenon called “the frozen middle”. This wasn’t that big a deal in the 2 startups that I’ve worked with, but in a large company the middle managers make a complex network of crossing accountabilities & dependencies that have to be traced & addressed before they will feel comfortable about signing up for […]