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Management Week in Review for March 4, 2011

Mar 4, 2011

Every week, I share three thought-provoking management posts for the week. Fair warning: I take a broad view of management, so my selections will range from leadership to innovation to finance and personal development and beyond. This week’s selections feature content on reinventing management, the strategic and practical implications of upgrade plans for consumer electronics products and some guidance on improving our decision-making by better utilizing outside advisors. Enjoy!

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Management Excellence Toolkit Part 2: Mind the Decision Traps

Feb 16, 2011

Part 1 of this series emphasized the importance of developing, updating and referencing a Decision Journal as part of your program to improve your decision-making effectiveness. In Part 2, we focus on understanding a bit more about how we make decisions, and I introduce the topic of decision traps.

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Management Excellence Toolkit: Part 1-Create a Decision Journal

Feb 9, 2011

Your decisions define you as a leader and a manager, yet we spend very little time in our busy lives finding ways to improve our abilities in this area. This Management Excellence Toolkit Series will help you recognize the challenges and pitfalls of individual and group decision-making and offer ideas on improving performance for you and your co-workers. In Part 1, I offer guidance on creating a Decision Journal for key and strategic decisions to monitor your effectiveness over time.

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Digging Your Way Out After the Brainstorm

Feb 1, 2011

There are many forms of ideation and all sorts of new tools available to facilitate web-based and remote brainstorming. The same issue in this post applies regardless of method: what are you going to do with the output?

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Management Excellence Book Review: Management? It’s Not What You Think

Dec 11, 2010

I confess to having a proclivity for essay collections when it comes to reading about management. Essays move along quickly and they offer the reader the opportunity to capture quick sound bites over breakfast, on the train or in other ideal reading rooms. Also, there’s the reality that many management books struggle to adequately fill the space between the book-covers, offering up their best in the introduction, the first chapter and the wrap-up chapter. Here are my thoughts on: Management? It’s Not What You Think! by Henry Mintzberg, Bruce Ahlstrand and Joseph Lampel.

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10 of My Favorite Dumb Ass Management Mistakes

Dec 7, 2010

In the spirit of my post, “At Least 20 Things to Stop Doing as a Leader,” which has grown well north of 50 thanks to a deluge of reader comments, I’m back with a list of some insanely stupid and all-too-common management mistakes. These focus more on the decisions, actions or inactions that contribute to creating even bigger problems. While I’ve remained on the positive side of the law here (felons, you’ve had your day!), some of these mistakes are truly criminal. Please feel free to chime in with your additions.

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Leadership Caffeine™: Mistakes are the Raw Ingredients of Leadership Courage

Nov 21, 2010

’ve made a number of mistakes over the course of my leadership career that make my head spin and my stomach turn just thinking about them. No life or death or business impacting mistakes, but, definitely some people and team impacting issues that created ill will and most definitely didn’t show me off at my leadership best. Learning from those mistakes helped me evolve my thinking on the role of a leader and on my true priorities in supporting my business, my peers and my team members.

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“Hey, What if One of Our Ships Gets Stranded?”

Nov 10, 2010

By now, most of us have seen or heard news footage of the Carnival Splendor stranded at sea after suffering an engine room fire and a subsequent loss of core systems including most power and importantly, the plumbing. Thankfully, no one was reported injured, but that’s about as good as the news gets in this situation. The fact that something went wrong at sea on one of those floating Mall of Americas is not surprising to me. What is surprising and disconcerting about the situation, is the apparent complete and utter lack of a risk response plan.

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