Thoughts on people, teams, organizations, communities, effectiveness and success
We don’t usually get to pick how or when we die.
We can, with some work, grit and luck, pick the sort of life we live.
Scott Mader, who passed away this week at the age of 57, sure did; his story has lessons for all of us.
Earnest is the first word that comes to mind when I think of Scott; while he had lots of qualities (a dry sense of humor, funny smart, a real moral compass, etc.)… Read the rest
Going home can sometimes be “interesting,” even when it’s somebody else’s home you’re visiting.
That legacy visit was my treat as I caught an annual dose of Tigard High School boys basketball as the Tigers visited the Forest Grove Vikings last week. While I don’t think history books show Vikings making it to the Pacific Northwest (nor tigers either, but a least the alliterative play off the founding forefather Wilson Tigard in 1852 makes sense), it’s a fun moniker in the land of 9 months of gray, cold and rain.… Read the rest
Who knew that hiring realities and a trip to my home state of Oregon would intersect.
But they did.
You know the deal. You’ve got a candidate or two from inside the firm to consider and candidates from outside that are in the vetting / interview hopper for the job.
You end up – surprise surprise – hiring the outsider. Only later do you come across the statistic from the Center for Creative Leadership that approximately 66% of senior execs hired from the outside fail within 18 months and that the overall failure rate for external hires within 3 years is 40%.… Read the rest
There are a lot of ways to build a company – some by accident, some products of history, and some by poorly conceived thinking (see Charlotte, North Carolina – who would think Charlotte would become a world banking headquarters?). An obvious goal is to base your business where it’s got good access to customers, talent, transportation or perhaps capital: do none well and you suck up time in travel, recruiting, and moving people that could be otherwise spent toward serving customers and making great products.… Read the rest
As a senior at Tigard High School, the Prom Queen was selected by a canned food competition between the three high school classes. The goal was to incent students to both show school spirit and bring in canned foods for people who were less fortunate and needed the food to eat to live.
Both competitive and adventuresome sorts, my class’ winning solution was to tin-cup class members for cash, and then ditch school to go buy canned foods at discount retailers that sold marred (but perfectly eatable) canned goods at a discount.… Read the rest