It’s 8 am Monday morning and George is sitting across the desk from Sue, his CEO. After just six weeks on the job, George saw a way to streamline a process, to make work easier for people on his team, not to mention save the company time and money. He couldn’t wait to share his [...]
The stories businesses tell affect their ability to succeed You’ve probably heard about the time JFK visited the NASA Space Center in 1962. While touring the facility, he stopped to greet a man who was sweeping the floors. Kennedy asked the man what he did there. The man replied, “Well, Mr. President, I’m helping put a [...]
The leadership team in a manufacturing company had a problem. Their global organization had them communicating across cultures, hierarchies and time zones. The result: breakdowns. To help them grasp the complexity of long-distance communication, I divided them into pairs with matching sets of building blocks. Their job was to sit back-to-back and create two identical [...]
Did you know there’s a hidden game playing out in your business? Every business has one. It’s made up of the unwritten (and generally unspoken) understandings, rules and agreements between people and functional areas that determine how work gets done. At an ad agency where I worked long ago, decisions would be made with the [...]
Pam, a former client who is a leader in a large nonprofit here in Southern California, has a role that requires that she travel. A lot. She considers herself good at it. She may not quite be at the level of the George Clooney character in Up in the Air; still, her carry on suitcase is [...]
Businessman trapped under a dollar sign --- Image by © Beau Lark/Corbis "Technical debt," refers to the extra development work that is inevitable when code that is easy to implement in the short run is used instead of applying the best overall solution. Developers can predict that they will have to repay that debt — potentially with steep "interest"— at some point in [...]
