Thoughts on people, teams, organizations, communities, effectiveness and success
While not abundant, you can spot them everywhere.
They are the sorts of colleagues who turn a ray of sunshine into a warning about skin cancer.
In a world of glass half-full or glass half-empty, they manage to always find the latter. It’s as if the coin flip for heads or tails always landed on one side, not the other.
They are colleagues nicknamed “Eeyore.… Read the rest
It was a nice compliment – as a finished a full day of facilitating and flipcharting – from a participant at an offsite I facilitated in Hong Kong.
“You have,” she said, “an amazing ability to distill what somebody said to a few words and capture it perfectly.”
“Thanks” I offered; “I’ve had lots of practice.… Read the rest
IBM founder and CEO Thomas Watson had a sign in his office – and more signs plastered throughout the firm.
Aretha Franklin sang about it in the movies.
Buddha noted “What we think we become.”
So why don’t we think more?
The thought came to mind as I trekked back from a week-long stay at San Francisco’s Camp Mather, a place in the high Sierras near Yosemite.… Read the rest
There are three well-known West Coast asset management firms (financial services speak for mutual funds, venture capital, private equity, hedge funds, or fund of funds firms) – none of them clients – where the firm’s leadership team members barely tolerate each other.
They talk when they must. Otherwise they minimize their working relationships as much as possible.
The firms make money. … Read the rest
I’ll be working with the staff of my favorite preschool (also the school my son attended, and on whose Board of Trustees I sat for four years), the Little School in San Francisco this evening as part of their ongoing staff development program.
While my work is mostly helping senior execs and start-up and leadership teams raise the level of their performance, the same ingredients which imbed that work – efficiency and effectiveness – inform the work of teachers in a preschool.… Read the rest
As in politics, hot words can get exchanged in business.
The colleague who never says peep now has new ways to describe you when they’re asked to share their thoughts on what it’s like to work as your colleague.
When the jolt of the words has washed over you, just what do you do when someone calls you – to phrase it politely – an SOB?… Read the rest