Thoughts on people, teams, organizations, communities, effectiveness and success
There are random events, and there are events that are chock full of patterns: the trick is knowing one set of events from the other, and in figuring out what, if anything, any patterns mean.
Something as simple as a run chart stuck up on your bulletin board wall helps you plot experience, whether it be the number of times your seven year old wakes-up at nights (less common lately – thank goodness) or the number of times things a client calls with one “last” change.… Read the rest
There is a quote someplace about “don’t sweat the details.”
When it comes to company building, though, sweating the details is what separates those that thrive – and survive– from start-up road kill. It’s exactly doing those (thoughtful) details that break or make a new company, not only the big picture stuff that might have sparked the launch.
That point was driven home working with a client this past week: successful over their first few years of existence the firm is at a point where they’re past start-up “survival mode” and focused on the things that will sustain them for years to come.… Read the rest
Like thousands of others, you probably have already read “Ten Secrets Headhunters (Usually) Don’t Tell You” ( here ) which covered the in and outs of working with headhunters. (Readers can go also through the full basics of job-hunting by reading the “Choose Me, Hire Me” series which starts here .)
But while headhunters can be helpful career advisors, few are.… Read the rest
Burning Man , that once a year event around the US Labor Day holiday where 50,000 mostly strangers set up an instant community in the Black Rock Desert area of northeastern Nevada evokes a couple, at least, of reactions.
For people from the North American Pacific West, it’s another mostly ho-hum event in which people learn, laugh, love, work, and have fun.… Read the rest
Cheating – a less polite way to say exaggerating facts and misstating the truth – is rampant.
While the name of the Dreamgirls song was Fake Your Way to the Top , it might as well be Cheat Your Way to the Top. As Pulitzer Prize winning columnist Leonard Pitts, Jr. – author of a weekly column and the book “ Forward From This Moment ” – said in a recent NPR interview ,” This whole idea that you can cheat your way to the top and it doesn’t matter – and it’s the same as if you’ve worked your way to the there is one of my pet peeves.”… Read the rest
Reader “S” follows-up with a note from my earlier post on why the Back West blog is getting hit with people doing searches using the keywords “McKesson layoff”:
“I’m not sure if your recent post on McKesson was a bait for info about layoffs, but I have a feeling why there may be an increase in searches recently. The layoffs that were announced just after the end of the fiscal year triggered the searches a few months ago.… Read the rest