I continue to be both amazed and humbled at the reception to my book, Leadership Caffeine: Ideas to Energize Your Professional Development. In celebration of the sixth year since publication, I am sharing one secret on where the book idea came from and showing my thanks for your support with 3 very special offers for free books to the first to respond.
The Leadership Caffeine Blog
Strategy Hunt
Getting strategy right is hard work. Most management teams struggle and many play with the tools of strategy, but never finish anything. Teams that get it right share some common traits, including…
The Top 10 Outcomes from an Art Petty Live Event
One of the happy outcomes of my leadership and management writing is the opportunity to speak and work with great groups of professionals in live settings. This post outlines the Top 10 Outcomes of one of my live events. I would love to work with you and your team!
New Video: 3 Ideas to Help Jump-Start Your Strategy Process
Helping a group align on the hard work of strategy is…hard work. Here are 3 ideas in my latest video update to help you get people working together early in the strategy process:
Podcast: David A. Brock and the Sales Manager Survival Guide
Every professional involved with sales, managing sales or managing sales professionals will enjoy this fun interview with David A. Brock, author of: Sales Manager Survival Guide–Lessons from Sales’ Front Lines. Dave’s new book and his ample advice in this podcast offer priceless guidance for success in one of the most challenging roles in our workplace.
What Videogame Designers Can Teach Us About Organizational Change
The ability to rewire our thinking about change may be a fundamental survival skill in a period of time where accelerating change is a given. Change must be interpreted as challenge, and building a culture that embraces the pursuit of a steady stream of new challenges must be the mandate of leaders. I think the video game designers have already cracked this code.
Dear Corporate—Why We Hate Your Business Reviews
The Business Review meeting is a staple of large and small organizations everywhere. These can either be constructive opportunities to reflect on challenges and opportunities and identify needed actions, or, they can be destructive time-wasters. Sadly, in many organizations, these meetings resemble the latter. Here are six ways the group from corporate contributes to the destruction of what should be an important meeting:
Art of Managing—Beware Lazy Approaches to the Hard Work of Strategy
“Not miscalculation, bad strategy is the active avoidance of the hard work of crafting a good strategy.” Richard Rumelt—Good Strategy/Bad Strategy Consider: “Our strategy is to be more profitable than our competitors.” “Our strategy is to grow from 10,000 to 100,000...
High Performance Management—All Strategy Work is Personal
Most businesses and most management teams flail and fail when it comes to the work of strategy. In today’s world, where the long-cycle strategy process has been replaced by short-bursts of experimentation and iteration, it’s essential to reduce the fail and flail by attacking the root causes of so much dysfunction with this work. Here are 7-Steps to to help the senior team get it right:
How Small-Company CEOs Can Build Management Teams that Work
One of the worst uses of the term, “team,” is in relationship to the group of executives who report to the CEO. For many of the (less than $200 million in annual revenue) firms I work with, there’s little beyond the “report to” issue that binds these groups together as a team. This is often frustrating to CEOs who expect more from their highest paid lieutenants. Here are 3 areas where these groups can and must coalesce as a team:




