No Goal + No Plan = No Performance

Man on the Moon (book)

No, no, no” I thought to myself as the senior executives at the leadership team retreat I facilitated outlined their “objectives” for the year.

A goal is simply something you plan to do; it becomes more meaningful when you have a time frame attached to it.

Goals are not, as I saw at the retreat, a rostering of things that people might do, might consider, or might explore with no time frame attached.… Read the rest

[Career Planning: Mergers & Acquisitions] What Do You Do When the Rumors Start?

Nothing’s guaranteed except change, and in business (as well as more than just a few non-profits) that means a churn of possible mergers, consolidations, and acquisitions. Across the country biotech companies, financial services firms like asset managers, hedge funds, venture capital and private equity firms, and any number of companies in other sectors are all scrambling – some to stay alive, others to grow by acquisition.Read the rest

[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