Recently I was working with on a consulting project for a growing company and the CEO asked me to spend some time working on leadership skills with one of his newer leaders. This person “Bob” came from a labor industry and had little schooling and little exposure to leadership training. When we met the first [...]
We live in a world of information, everyone claims to be well informed with surface information from the latest tweet or sound byte. With the fast pace of assimilation- new people being added to the mix at work, new teams being formed and new projects with new dynamics there is a tendency for people to [...]
In my work with leaders and their organizations I am often asked, “Why are we great at innovation but why can’t we get everyone to execute?” There are three critical components to optimal organizations they consist of outside information, innovation and execution see figure 1 below: What this visual demonstrates is that if you have [...]
Is leadership innate or learned? Clients ask me this a lot and my answer is that leadership is both innate and learned. Now, that may not be what you expected to hear from me and maybe an ambiguous answer but here is what I have learned. There are some people who [...]
In March 2012 I surveyed the CEO’s of the companies I have been working with and asked them what are their biggest concerns right now. They said that #1 is attracting the right people to the business and #2 innovating to drive business forward. The two issues go hand in hand- we need good people [...]
Money and time- two of the most sought after items in our adult life. It seems that we are either chasing money or trying to make time. I am re-reading Alan Weiss’s book on Million Dollar Consulting and he says that true wealth is an abundance of discretionary time. The CEO’s that I consult and [...]
This question came up in a CEO meeting a few days ago. This CEO of a multimillion dollar horticulture company was struggling with getting everyone to make progress on their projects and meet specific goals. I asked a few questions such as: What is driving them to get things done? Is there an end goal? [...]
In researching and gathering intelligence over the years I have found that there are three big challenges organizations face and they are: #1- The more traditional an organization the more they tend to rely on letting past success to dictate future success. #2- They do not see the urgency of people development and are not [...]
