Understanding What Really Drives Change

I read an interesting paper looking at the question of whether or not
organizational culture can over-ride leadership in the change game.
Actually I thought the question was a straw man, as it seems all to
obvious that leaders have a tough time trying to get organizations
to change.
By-the-way, the article I’m referring to does a nice job of looking at
models [...]

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Why New Hires Fail – what to look for when hiring

If you’ve been in a hiring process lately, dollars to donuts you started
by looking at the person’s resume, and oriented your interview process
around that document in one form or another.  Would it surprise you to
know that you are looking in the wrong place for most of what you need?
Resume’s are important; they serve as an [...]

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The Difference between Strategic Planning & Financial Planning

The question of what’s strategic versus a financial plan comes up often. 
In fact when reviewing strategic plans it’s easy to see that they overlap
and at times get confused.  Let me share 3 simple “rules of thumb” I use
to sort this out.
Before I go into what works for me, let’s go over a couple of examples:
1.  [...]

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Performance Reviews; Do they Fit

Sheri Mazurek wrote a thought provoking blog  covering some of the common
negative review experiences, entitled, Why we hate the performance review .
You could probably confirm or add to the list.  The question in this
blog, maybe more of a trial assertion, is this
“What if performance reviews only fit 20% of the environments they are
introduced into, e.g. what [...]

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When Collaboration Doesn’t Work

I read an interesting blog this week from David Coleman, entitled
When Collaboration Doesn’t Work.  He chose to focus on the possible
causes for a low level of collaboration.  But his title question got me
thinking more specifically about the challenge of the situations in
which collaboration isn’t all that it is cracked up to be.

Frankly, sometimes collaboration is a [...]

Posted in Collaboration | 2 Comments »

Performance Tools – Use Them or Leave

What if someone told you, either use our performance tools or leave.
That’s just what one of our customers did with his entire company
recently.  What would you do?  What if you needed to convey the
message?  Guess what, if you are managing people, you probably do
need to convey that message from time to time.
This is the second [...]

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Performance, Lines and Outcomes

Boundaries, lines, totals… they all represent a form of defining what
performance level is good enough.  In fact the term performance is a
void unless you have a measure for rating or comparison purposes. 
I want to cover a couple of “lines” that are hidden performance boosters.
I describe them as hidden, because I find people miss them over
and over again.
But before [...]

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Strategic plan; Thought, Actions or Write-up

This week I read a blog from Fred Nichols, discussing whether most of the
value is in a strategic plan, or in the process of creating one.  It got me
thinking about how to define what really is a strategic plan, hence this
blog and a question (well actually several) to you:
If the strategic plan is essentiallythe plan to [...]

Posted in Strategic Planning & Execution | 4 Comments »

How to Improve Software User Adoption by 50% in 10 days

This week we’ve been doing a major launch and ran into the familiar
concern, “how do we get people to use the software once we buy it?”
Most people miss one simple tactic that works wonders, which we’ll
cover in this blog.
First of all, there are a number of things you can do to improve
utilization, depending on the [...]

Posted in Software Adoption | 0 Comments »

Project Planning – 2 Questions that Improve Results Every Time

Project planning.  A two word phrase that spans everything from
doing “it in your head” to complex gannt and mind map plans.  With,
all that variability, there’s a lot consistency as well, including the fact
that project plans can get stale and out-of-date pretty quickly after inception.
So here’s a quick blog on project planning and the two key [...]

Posted in Project Management | 0 Comments »