Thoughts on people, teams, organizations, communities, effectiveness and success
I hope to have coffee soon with a friend I’ll call “Margie.” While it won’t be Wizard of Oz dialogue (Cowardly Lion: “What makes a king out of a slave? Courage!”), there will some similarities.
And those similarities will have a lesson for entrepreneurs who are female.
For starters, the impact and power and roles models is well understood and well researched.… Read the rest
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
Organizations tell you lots of about themselves from how they deal and treat applicants. The task, for candidates, is to make sure you’ve got your radar up, and don’t bliss out and fall in love to the point were you stop tracking all the things that go on in front of you.
If a company treats candidates poorly, you shouldn’t be surprised if some of that behavior carries on after people come on board.… Read the rest
The challenge for most of us is to do more with less: less time, fewer resources, and do it more efficiency and effectively. Sounds like a tall order but grabbing a moment to pause, think, and then act will frequently help you do all three.
Pulling rabbits out of hats?
Nope. Just performance basics that any successful executive, or a parent with more than two kids will tell you: figuring out how to sequence work so you pick up some efficiencies or batching things to time of day to optimize how effectively you work with them.… Read the rest
A chuckle was the first reaction when I saw Ann Handley’s (@marketingprofs) retweet of Ted Minnini’s post – For Sale: Business Culture – on the retailing of the Zappos culture. Zappos founder and CEO Tony Hseih – whose company was recently sold to Amazon – has been offering 2 days seminars for people to learn how to replicate the Zappos (success) story.… Read the rest
Tomorrow is the annual celebration of the Martin Luther King’s birthday, and as I sit here with my 7 year-old son, I wonder what Dr. King would make of aspects of our world today some 40+ years after his death.
Some parts of the world would like strikingly familiar. As chronicled in a trip to south Texas this past year – The Pace of Change: Uvalde, Texas 1953 – some parts of the nation look socially as they must have not only 40 years ago, but 60 or 70 years ago.… Read the rest