strategy

Your company social media strategy reflects organization culture, part 1

Blog

If you want an idea of organization culture your social media strategy provides a view. Companies who look at social media as a marketing vehicle miss far more than customer engagement.  Restrictive or minimalist social media reflects an organization culture most likely missing employee engagement long before social media’s meritocracy and transparency. Your company marketing [...]

2 comments Read the full article →

The best meeting icebreaker to break the ice

Blog

Meeting icebreakers can be as painful as a bucket of ice down your shorts.  The icebreaker’s intent?  Loosen things up, meet people, set the stage for effective work. The challenge, if you are going to use an icebreaker, is to understand the difference between hokey and intentional. Know your audience is a constant refrain.  But sometimes, [...]

0 comments Read the full article →

Getting it done versus getting it accomplished

Blog

Some people, and some organizations, can confuse very elemental operational concepts.  The confusion is tough to trace to a culture issue or a perception issue between getting it done versus getting it accomplished. Getting it done means you care more about finishing than about quality. Very different terms. Very different concepts. An alternative way to [...]

0 comments Read the full article →

The final frontier of competitive advantage

Blog

Competitive advantage:  the final frontier. Today only 2 areas remain for competitive advantage: talent management and project management Put another way, an organization has 2 ways to beat their competition: their ability to motivate people and their ability to reliably deliver projects Talent As a Hard Asset Hiring the right talent and keeping that talent [...]

6 comments Read the full article →

The bureaucracy option to manage risk

Blog

Does organization culture benefit with bureaucracy?  Bureacracy may, indeed, provide organizations a strong case to manage risk. Policy, procedure, and bureaucracy tend to creep as an organization grows in size:  revenues, market share, employees. While a small organization may have flexibility and ad hoc procedures based on 1-on-1 interactions, as an organization adds people the [...]

0 comments Read the full article →

Project management is useless without scale

Blog

Project management is a profession. Project management is a discipline. Project management is a skill. Project management is a function. Project management is a knowledge Project management is useless without scale and project management helps no one if it is not scaleable. Compare an accounting function of a Fortune 50 company to an accounting function in a 60-person organization.  The [...]

0 comments Read the full article →

Communication, change, and your mission – if you choose to accept it

Blog

Change is fun for some:  the energy of the unknown, the passion instilled in people looking forward to a new adventure.  Some embrace the unknown as an opportunity to both learn, grow, and stretch their current perspectives. Change is pain for some:  the feigned excitement for heading into unknown, the new roles and responsibilities to [...]

0 comments Read the full article →

Fistful of beans 03/30/2011

Blog

4 things I’ve seen, read, or thought might seed results: 1. Still too big to fail — CFO Magazine Too-big-to-fail is defined as the government using taxpayer dollars to rescue “systemically important” banks. Few debate that the expectation of bailouts provides banks little incentive to guard against excessive risk.  Today the solutions being debated may elevate overall [...]

0 comments Read the full article →

An organization intervention is not an organization inquisition

Blog

Proposals for organization intervention, from business process re-engineering to Lean initiatives, typically focus on problems to be solved.  Many of these organization interventions for change, however, soon look like organization inquisition.  As once a problem is identified, the problem is the focus to diagnose soon both the organization and the people involved pointed out as [...]

0 comments Read the full article →

Business strategy failures are project management failures

Blog

The essence of strategic change is not a new direction, but a series of directives on what to start, what to stop, and what to continue. After all, a strategic plan really acts as a roadmap or charter for change.  A plan not carried out is a project failure. The difficulty of strategy implementation is a [...]

2 comments Read the full article →

Fistful of beans 02/09/2011

Blog

5 things I’ve seen, read, or thought might seed results: 1. Apple, With or Without Steve Jobs — Bloomberg Businessweek Perhaps there is a coincidence last week’s Fistful of Beans presented an article to divine Google’s possible transformation through their leadership queue, but it looks like Apple is heading into their own multiple-choice risk scenario.  Now [...]

0 comments Read the full article →

Crowdsourcing your organization strategy, what’s to appreciate?

Blog

Crowdsourcing relies on people to participate in a meaningful process as potential partners.  In crowdsourcing people who were formally known as the customer now become the collaborator.  The power of collective collaboration can not only drive product innovation, but has been leveraged for decades to build organization strategy. Where most organization strategic plan process finds [...]

2 comments Read the full article →

The value of information and the link to development

Blog

Information is not competitive advantage, knowledge is competitive advantage.  What you know is information, only when you socialize your information does it then have potential to become knowledge.  An organization’s socialized knowledge is really their competitive advantage and information and knowledge are both human capital issues. Enterprise knowledge management is a critical strategic need and [...]

0 comments Read the full article →

Fistful of beans 01/19/2011

Blog

5 things I’ve seen, read, or thought might seed results: 1. The tussle for talent — The Economist Successful companies integrate talent development with their broader strategy to ensure that companies are more than the sum of their parts.  P&G, for example, likes its managers to be both innovative and worldly: they cannot rise to the [...]

0 comments Read the full article →

← Previous Entries

Next Entries →