Let’s Take the Cult out of Silicon Valley Culture
I am big believer in strong corporate cultures. Culture can be used to set powerful norms. Culture can bind people in an organization to a common set of values bigger than their quarterly objectives and key results (OKRs). Culture helps attracts the right people to your organization – and can drive out the wrong ones […]
Not in My Kitchen, You Don’t: Leaders as Norm Setters
There are two types of restaurants: those where it’s acceptable for a cook to pickup dropped food and serve it, and those where it’s not. Sure, when asked, everyone would say it’s unacceptable to serve dropped food in their kitchen. But is that how their kitchen actually runs? One of my favorite definitions of culture […]
Quota Over-assignment and Culture
Here’s a great slide from the CFO Summit at Zuora’s 2017 annual flagship Subscribed event. Since they talk about this as under-assignment, since people aren’t great at flipping fractions in their head, and since I think of this more intuitively as over-assignment, I’m going to invert this and turn it into a pie chart. So, here you […]
10 Questions to Ask Yourself Before Moving into Management
I went looking for a post to help someone decide if they should move into management, but couldn’t find one that I really loved. These three posts aren’t bad. Nor is this HBR article. But since I couldn’t find a post that I thought nails the spirit of the question, I thought I’d write one myself. […]
“Are you saying the map’s wrong?” – “Oh dear, yes!” – an example of Liminal Thinking
Earlier this week I met with Dave Gray and he gave me an advance copy of his new book, and then I went to his talk at Postshift on Wednesday night. He talked Liminal Thinking, so what is that? You might know that I am a huge fan of The West Wing (and Aaron Sorkin’s […]
Six Words That Can Make or Break Your Credibility: “I’ll Get It To You Tomorrow”
I can’t tell you the number of times people I’ve worked with over the years have said ,”I’ll get it to you tomorrow,” and then don’t. Sometimes they take a few extra days. Sometimes, amazingly, they don’t get it to me at all. Maybe I’m the problem. Maybe I’m one of a rare breed who thinks […]
CeBIT SBA keynote – Strategic Building Blocks for your Digital Transformation Strategy
As my last post explained, I was privileged to do the opening keynote, substituting for Dion Hinchcliffe, at this week’s Social Business Arena at CeBIT 2015. The theme of the show was social as the enabler for digital transformation. I expanded on a session I did at the Enterprise 2.0 Paris Summit with some additional […]
Why is Good Customer Service So Difficult?
This could easily be a rant based on some recent customer service experiences but I’m going to avoid that and instead look at what companies are facing today in trying to meet customer expectations. I read recently that Comcast has finally appointed a VP to try and address their extremely poor customer service (I’d say […]
Marketing in 2014 – Part Two
In Part One of this series I listed 6 issues that are causing disruption and change in marketing. In this post let’s focus on inbound marketing and the shift to a more content marketing focus and away from outbound or broadcast marketing tactics. This fundamental shift is often the underlying issue with most of the […]
To Pre-Meet Or Not To Pre-Meet: That Is The Question
I once asked one of my board members which CEO ran the best board meetings across his portfolio companies. His answer was, let’s call him, Jack. Here’s what he said about him: Jack got the board deck out 3-4 days in advance of the board meeting Jack would call him — and every other board […]
