Thoughts on people, teams, organizations, communities, effectiveness and success
It they’d been sipping brews or smoking cigarettes I probably wouldn’t have noticed.
Instead what caught my eye and ear was the crew at the open deli kitchen of Bi-Rite Market talking about what they needed to be aware of and do to make the day go smoothly.
I reminded me that sometimes the simplest way to get results is the hardest.… Read the rest
I had coffee with a colleague I’ll call Andy; he’s got a problem.
You might have the same problem too.
Subject? How to (finally) get an offer from a firm that’s been courting him for 10 months. Position scope change, multiple lunches and interviews, headcount freezes and freeze liftings have all come and gone without “the offer we’ll be giving you” actually happening.… Read the rest
While the Twittersphere exploded with Presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s “binders full of women” it shouldn’t have been any surprise.
Guess what? Romney has lot of company. Many, many organizations lack decent diversity at the leadership level of one sort or another, whether it be racial/ethnic diversity or male/female diversity.
What’s “decent” diversity? Enough of something to have a critical mass and not the one token person of color or one female (or male) on an otherwise homogeneous executive team or board of trustees.… Read the rest
It happens.
The new senior hire (formerly called a senior suit in the days when the males who mostly occupied those roles actually wore matching jackets and pants) is keen to make their mark at the new place so they make changes. Often big ones.
Sometimes those changes work, and sometimes they bomb.
New CEO Marissa Meyer has clearly put her mark on a number of shifts at Yahoo in the five weeks she’s been on board changing some obvious practices: free food (a la Google, where she formerly worked) at many of Yahoo’s locations, instituting weekly check-in meetings (called FYI in Yahoo-speak), a reinvigorated and more rigorous hiring process, and engaging in greater dialogue and access with programmers than her predecessors. … Read the rest
Steve Jobs changed millions of lives. I know; he changed mine too.
From time to time people come along who greatly inform you, either by their immediate presence or the impact of their work.
Jobs did both; from the “insanely great” products he strove (and drove others crazy) to build to the example he set as a maverick (“pirate” might be his preferred youthful self-description).… Read the rest
Like dipping into the summer water of Northern California (Wow! Pretty cold!) if you’re teaching someone to swim in the San Francisco Bay, I spend time for the executive and career coaching part of my work with recruiters, executive search consultants, and sometimes applying for jobs.
How else to know how the job market works if you don’t experience it first hand?… Read the rest