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Like it or not, most of us think about career success in terms of moving up the hierarchy. Let me illustrate with a story: I once worked with the new CEO of a well-known global firm that was barely breaking even. The CEO’s mandate from the board was to improve prof…
Have you ever been asked to drop everything to complete a seemingly urgent task, and then found that the task wasn’t so urgent after all? Not long ago, one of our clients gave us three days to put together a proposal to help with a very large and complex reorganiza…
While most managers complain about being overloaded with responsibilities, very few are willing to give up any of them. It’s one of the great contradictions of organizational life.
We’ve all heard the famous bromide that “honesty is the best policy.” But when it comes to performance feedback, honesty often falls by the wayside.
Unless you follow tech companies, you might have missed the startling announcement by collaboration and communications software maker 37signals that it has decided to refocus the entire company on a single core product.“Refocusing” might be an understatement.
As a recognized discipline, change management has been in existence for over half a century. Yet despite the huge investment that companies have made, most studies still show a 60-70% failure rate for organizational change projects.
Human beings have an almost infinite capacity to rationalize failure. For example, many years ago I was working with a project team at what was then Chase Manhattan Bank when a once-in-a-decade snowstorm shut down New York City for several days.
The best way for a manager to be successful is to build a top-notch team. But when most managers take on new positions, they hesitate to act quickly in replacing poor performing incumbents.
In setting out to implement any major initiative, it is important to ask the right questions – in other words, to frame the problem correctly. This crucial first step lays the groundwork for the entire planning, preparation, and implementation of whatever the organ…
It wasn’t too long ago that corporations were the villains – polluting the environment, exploiting workers, and consuming energy and other resources without concern for long term consequences to the planet.