Many of us struggle with having a seemingly endless ToDo list. While prioritizing it can sometimes help, often writing the number 48 in front of an activity can just cause more frustration. Years ago I looked for ways to manage my list. I asked peers and mentors how they dealt with the things they had … Continue reading The Eisenhower Matrix
Category: Teams
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 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?
There is a misunderstanding of Scrum and other processes and frameworks that anyone that follows the “rules” will be successful. Simply write some code in a two week Sprint and show it at the Sprint Review and magically all problems disappear. The people that believe this are missing a few key points. 1) Creation of … Continue reading Scrum, Skill and Dead Bodies
I talk quite a bit about the concept of intrinsic motivation in my presentations and workshops. Intrinsic motivation describes our satisfaction in doing something simply for the sake of doing it. Think of playing an instrument, solving a puzzle or painting a picture. The activity is a reward in itself. Daniel Pink’s “Drive” is great … Continue reading Intrinsic Motivation – Drive
I have founded or co-founded a number of startups, worked as a consultant for Fortune 100 companies, and been an executive in large corporations. What I’ve come to hold true is that as a company grows it experiences what Dr. Larry E. Greiner calls “growth phases.” Dr. Greiner postulated the existence of these phases in … Continue reading Company Growth