Tag: effective leadership

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How to Get a Great Start: “Back to School”

The art of the good, strong start is something that many of us should master, but few of us seldom do.

Why? Probably because it’s a little like that set of occasions (weddings, funerals, baptisms and bar/bas mitzvahs etc.) that happen enough to notice but seldom enough to avoid generating a best practice mindset.

Many schools – like my son’s grade school Marin Country Day School in Corte Madera – have the practice down to a fine art, in part because the start happens on a regular basis, they believe it’s important to do it right, and if you’re smart enough to do it well it can form a foundation for a host of activities and programs to follow.… Read the rest

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[Life Back West] Leadership & Boards of Directors: Proof of the Pudding is in the Performance

The best adage I know for good cooking is captured in the phrase “Proof of the pudding is in the eating.”

For teams, the perfect saying might as well be “Proof of the team is in the performance.” And while we’ll hear a lot about good and bad teams over the next couple of months – from the Super Bowl, to the Winter Olympics, to the US men’s and women’s collegiate basketball tournament known as “March Madness” – the fact of the matter is that the best teams are teams that perform well when called on.… Read the rest

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[Life Back West] June 2009 – Step Up Day

Transition markers for the big things in life abound: diplomas from schools, birth certificates of children, employee of the year plaques and deal tombstones . All of them shout out “big step” congratulations.

But what marks the in-betweens – the minor and important accomplishments that put you in a position for those bigger deeds and accomplishments? How do you mark task well done , knowing that it makes you able to do job done well ?… Read the rest

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[Jurassic Park] The New Big (Company) Kid on the Block

I drove to my client, a company on the Peninsula, past what was formerly Genentech Inc. (acquired by Roche) in South Francisco, on the same day that General Motors filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

If I had driven further south I would have passed buildings that formerly housed Bay Networks and 3Com, long gone former or diminished competitors of Cisco, and by a location that was Informix (subsumed by IBM), Sun Microsystems (acquired by Oracle), and Silicon Graphics , a leader in computer graphics in the mid-1990’s and a recent bankruptcy participant, acquired by Rackable Systems.… Read the rest