In his book, Seeing What Others Don’t, Gary Klein retells the story of a seminar attendee. It illustrates perfectly the contrast between what managers should and should not do if they want to be fully engaged with their employees. The person in question said that when she went into her boss’ office, he was focused […]
He had all the aspirations of a normal boy. He wanted to play football, though not the American version. He wanted to have a career. He wanted to get married someday, and he didn’t have any advantages to help him. As it turned out, he achieved a great deal more. At 19, he began his […]
Many believe that organizations have to continually reinvent themselves in order to keep up with all that is changing around them. They point to the fact that those who cling to the status quo eventually die or are acquired by those who don’t, and they often – quite proudly – point to themselves as the […]
A stakeholder is anyone who shares (or might share) one or more of your objectives or goals. In other words, anyone who has some stake in the work you do or its outcome. Stakeholders can sit inside or outside your organization, and increasingly they sit in different time zones, different business units, or different companies […]
While there’s some doubt now as to whether or not Calvin Coolidge coined this saying, the advice still holds true: “Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the […]
It’s been suggested that successful change can be better achieved by working with or within the culture of organizations rather than against it. On the face of it, this seems to be so obvious that there’s no need to mention it all. But as Sherlock Holmes once observed, “There’s nothing so deceptive as an obvious […]
Now there’s a question. Business transformation has been with us for more than 30 years. It began under the guise of re-engineering in the 1980s and, like nearly every other “new” management tool, has been simply renamed as time has gone along. This can be easily borne out by a looking at Google Scholar. It’s […]
Pareto’s 80/20 Law teaches us how to get the greatest results. In a nutshell, it tells us that we get 80% of our results from 20% of our efforts. The flip side is also true. We expend 80% of our efforts in order to squeeze out the remaining 20%. The key, of course, is to […]
Jesse Jacoby
