Thoughts on people, teams, organizations, communities, effectiveness and success
If you live in a certain City by the bay, sooner or later little surprises you.
Annoy you? Yes. Delight you? Often. Alarm, disappoint, thrill, and endear? Always.
It’s those differences that make the place so special. Take away those difference and ultimately it leads to one destination; the land of boring, common, even mediocre.
Some workplaces are just like that City.… Read the rest
North Americans (OK, maybe just those of us who are Yankees) love simple solutions, especially to complex problems.
We want a pill to cure obesity (instead of a change in diet, lifestyle, better sleep, and appropriate physical activity) and student testing to cure educational ills (in lieu of better teacher training and development, better resourcing, smaller class size, and greater parental involvement).… Read the rest
With a nod to Kelly Clarkson, the first part of a fiscal year for many firms is “off-site” time. Leaders go with their teams to a place off-site with hopes that a change of scenery – and sometimes a round of golf or some collegial dinners – will change dynamics and improve performance.
It probably won’t.
But don’t blame the off-site for the lack of a durable performance bump.… Read the rest
I am no speechwriter nor am I a speech analyst: I stick to my knitting coaching teams and execs. But a “lite” version of an exercise I utilize I call “Road Trip” was one of the things my son learned at school Tuesday, January 20th as he and all the other kids from the lower grades watched the inaugural speech of a new President of the United States .… Read the rest
My dad, who passed away at age 96, referred to life in his later years as “Mike raising father.” From the land of what goes around comes around, my son Traylor seems to be inspiring the same type of learnings for this pop.
After lunchroom / playground duty with fellow volunteer parents Erica and Billy at the new school , I got to see a couple of my son’s classmates apply simple pragmatism to recess.… Read the rest
Yale professor and statistician Ed Tufte has crisply detailed the unfortunate trail of missed information that led to the death of astronauts and the failure of the Challenger spacecraft mission. In brief the issue was not that NASA lacked the relevant information to make a correct decision: they had the information – they just didn’t understand it.
My coaching work with start-up and leadership teams shares a similarity with Tufte’s work with the Challenger episode: how do you surface the most important information and act on it?… Read the rest