The June 2006 issue of Harvard Management Update had an interesting article called Trust Makes the Team Go ‘Round, by Judith A. Ross. For some reason, I fixated on this: “Neale [Margaret Neale, a Stanford Graduate School of Business professor] notes that the e-mail behavior of Americans, who tend to go immediately into the task,… Read More
Picking up where we left off yesterday: Are David Maister’s, Bob Sutton’s, and Michael Lovaglia’s views in conflict? I believe they are different perspectives of the same situation. Sutton seems to be describing how he feels decisions SHOULD be made based on evidence. He also admits that they aren’t actually made that way very often.… Read More
Bob Sutton is a professor of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford Engineering School and one of my all time favorite authors and commentators on innovation, management, and creativity in business. In their book on evidence-based management, he and Jeffrey Pfeffer, hold that: “Evidence-based management is based on the belief that facing the hard… Read More
In the past several weeks I’ve been watching interesting debates about why people blog, what they want to get out of it, why they care (or don’t care) about user statistics, and why they believe they should post at whatever rate they have chosen to post. It made me ask myself: What do I get… Read More
Do you need a boss? According to Seth Godin bosses do a lot for us! “Bosses decide what’s urgent. Bosses pay you even when the client doesn’t honor the invoice. Bosses create deadlines, and stick with them. Bosses pay for the Postits.” We’ve talked about becoming a Solopreneur and some of the transitions you might… Read More
A few years ago a colleague pointed me to ChangeThis, a site that publishes author submitted manifestos about business, politics, technology, and change. Why write a manifesto? “We’re betting that a significant portion of the population wants to hear thoughtful, rational, constructive arguments about important issues” (from the ChangeThis Manifesto). Some of my favorite… Read More
I must admit that this summer has been crazy! I have been busier both personally and professionally in the last several weeks than I have in a long time. Aside from writing, and consulting, and planning neat projects, I’ve also been training. In September I’ll walk the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer 3-Day. We walk… Read More
Leaders build teams. Leaders create leaders. They’re open to new approaches and they take the risk to trust the people they’ve positioned to lead their teams. They release elements of control and accountability to these trusted teams, but they always retain overall accountability. They take the arrows when needed. They remove obstacles. They don’t set out… Read More