In a recent workshop, a senior leader remarked that he had never considered half-baked ideas to be very valuable. He previously thought that ideas needed to be fully formed before they could see the light of day. The fact is that many valuable ideas don’t look like much when they [...]
A key ingredient to get high value things done is the belief that it actually matters. And nothing turns up the heat like a shared sense of urgency. REAL urgency can be a savvy leader’s superpower, but it CAN be frittered away. Keep these four points in mind to make [...]
Visibility about what to support is one of the biggest obstacles leaders have when making tough decisions today. Line item expense numbers are easy to see---and easy to cut. What’s hard to see are the initiatives to feed…and that’s another good reason to have an innovation management platform. Otherwise: baby [...]
The Boys in the Boat is the story of a collegiate rowing crew from the University of Washington and their pursuit of Olympic gold in the 1936 Olympics, hosted by Hilter’s Germany. While the entire story is epic, one aspect that stands out for me is the optimistic and persistent [...]
Some days we might wish we could just wake up and all the uncertainty caused by Covid-19 would be over. Unfortunately, that’s a luxury few of us can afford. There are some tough challenges to handle in the short-term. But let’s not forget that there is a lot of good [...]
By any standard, we are in very uncertain times. The world is coping with the health aspects of a pandemic as well as from the related economic fallout. If that were not enough, we are in the middle of an election cycle with elements from either extreme acting like children. [...]
My wife recently sent out a cute little postcard to her travel clients. It featured a dinosaur whose arms were too short to clap, with the caption “If you’re happy and you know it, clap your…oh.” Everybody who has grown up in the US has heard this little children’s song. [...]
Is your "Good Idea Machine" ready for what's coming? Many leaders are observing that the move of offices to remote work has been remarkably smooth, with little to no impact on productivity. It is why many leaders are not in a hurry to take any risks about the move back [...]
How well do you SHOW openness to ideas? The many leaders I talk to will say that they are in the market for new ideas. AT THE SAME TIME many of the people I talk to in organizations, will say that they feel that their opinions don’t really matter that [...]
As part of her training to become an assassin, Arya Stark in the Game of Thrones series (remember the simpler era of fantasy dragons and “white walkers”?) was tasked with always reporting three new things she had learned to her teacher. Observing and sharing what is going on in the [...]