I was again honored by having Steve Jagler of the Milwaukee Biz Times interview me on my customer philosophy. The idea that: ... the damage to our team and our company is too great to stay in relationships with abusive clients May seem absurd, but after you’ve tried everything you can to make thing … Continue reading Don’t be afraid to fire a customer
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I’ve been using a variety of personality assesments on teams over the years and found them to be useful. The new Strengthse Finder 2.0 from Gallup and Tom Rath is definetely one I’m adding to the list. Throught tests similar to DiSC or MBTI is classifies your top strengths or themes. These themes can help … Continue reading Strengths Finder 2.0
Having sat through many organization’s strategic planning session witnessing nearly the same amount of SWOT analyses, I’ve come to the concusion that they rarely create value. It’s not that they NEVER are useful, it’s just that they typically get a team looking inward and backward as opposed to outward and forward. Further, SWOT can be disembodied … Continue reading STP over SWOT
I’m honored to have the Milwaukee Business Journal do a write up on my love of Taekwondo. Thanks Barb!
From a Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) standpoint my personailty is often described as ENTP or ENTJ. With each letter describing where I stand in the four personality dichotomies, I’m (E)xtraverted, use i(N)tuition to make many decisions, enjoy (T)thinking about problems and am (P)erceptive or (J)udging in many lifestyle choices. The result I get just depends … Continue reading Life as an ENTx Leader
A good discussion by Steven J. Spear on how experimentation is useful when dealing with complex systems like markets and Mustangs. Spear explains how this technique led Toyota to the creation of Lexus.
There seems to be a ton of willingness today for companies to modify their legal relationship with their clients. Maybe we are finally at a point where we realize that holding people’s feet to the fire doesn’t produce the kind of results we had hoped for. What I’m talking about here is commonly referred to … Continue reading Agile Contracts
I just finished reading Deborah Mills-Scofield’s HBR article on bringing back corporate accountability. This is a great article in its own right. It lead me to an article she posted in April of this year on building Communities of Practice by Building Virtues into the Organization’s DNA. Her moonshots to fix problems we see in … Continue reading Revamp an Organizations DNA?
I have done source code branching with a ton of teams. The pattern looks pretty much the same independent of what type of branching the team is doing. “We are doing some work that we don’t want other teams to see or get impacted by.” So it goes the team creates a branch to work … Continue reading Is Branching a Dysfunction?
I spend a fair amount of time these days working with senior business leaders on some of the challenges they face. One of the things that both they and I are seeing is the impact of shorter business cycles on planning. While the use of the word “cycle” implies that these changes occur with some … Continue reading Agile and the Boom/Bust Cycle