[email protected]

847-612-8420

Free Consultation

The Leadership Caffeine Blog

Explore by Category:

Introducing The Saturday Serial—An Ongoing Management & Leadership Case

Feb 7, 2015

Welcome to The Saturday Serial! This new series reflects my intent and attempt to share and cultivate management and leadership lessons beyond the format of a stale blog post and endless lists of “10 ideas to… .” While I love writing the Management Excellence blog and the first 1,025 posts are testament to my commitment, I’ve wanted to experiment with the serial and management fable format here for a long time. Beginning with my first episode, “Welcome to ACME John Anderson,” you will meet a growing cast of characters facing a series of very real management, leadership and career challenges in this fictional high-tech, global conglomerate and its various units and divisions. Enjoy!

read more

Art of Managing—Strengthen Performance by Clarifying Your Firm’s Values

Nov 24, 2014

Successful companies in my experience operate with a set of clearly understood, actionable values. These values transcend behavior and point to purpose, direction and approach. Most of the time, they are codified or articulated however, in the case of some smaller or start-up organizations, they are present in the environment even if they are missing from the framed artwork on the wall. If your values aren’t working incredibly hard to support your firm every day, it’s time to consider a refresh.

read more

Level-Up #2—Reality Check for the New Vice President

Oct 12, 2014

There are few more simultaneously exciting and disorienting experiences in your professional life than your initial promotion to a corporate position as vice president of something. Here are 4 very real facts of life for you in your new role and some thoughts about what to do about them:

read more

Just One Thing—Is it Time to Suspend Your Judgment in Hiring?

Apr 30, 2014

There’s an interesting article in the May, 2014 issue of Harvard Business Review, entitled, “In Hiring, Algorithms Beat Instinct.” According to the authors, we would be better served by letting algorithms do the heavy lifting before inserting our own bias-filled and easily distracted selves into the hiring equation. Provocative, yes, but I’m not convinced that it’s time to defer judgment to a test instrument. Here’s why…

read more

From the Archives: 5 Priceless Lessons from Amundsen and Scott

Jan 5, 2014

In preparation for an upcoming presentation, I’ve become a bit obsessed with studying the 1910 expeditions and race between Roald Amundsen and Robert Falcon Scott to 90-degrees South (the South Pole). The lessons for leaders and managers practically leap off the pages of this classic example of coping with risk, uncertainty and volatility. Here are 5 of the more noteworthy lessons gained from this jour

read more

Art of Managing-6 Ideas to Help Management Groups Develop as Teams

Jun 12, 2013

From long experience and ample client CEO and Board input, the typical state of a management team looks less like a team and more like a group of functional experts who occasionally gather to talk uncomfortably (and shallowly) about the hard issues confronting their organization. The behaviors and integration you might anticipate from a “team” of smart people are often absent from the equation. Here are 6 ideas to help cultivate team performance at the senior management level:

read more

Art of Managing: Beware the Pursuit of False Precision in Planning

Mar 24, 2013

Chance are, you’ve seen this movie before. It’s the one where you or your team are on the hook for distilling the chaos and complexity of the market and the ambiguities and risks surrounding emerging opportunities, competitors and disruptive technologies, into a nice, neat multi-year forecast. As Eisenhower offered, In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.”

read more

Just One Thing: Leading is Lonely Work

Mar 7, 2013

Leading is lonely work. The higher you climb on the ladder, the tougher and lonelier the decisions become. Get used to it. No one ever signed on as a senior leader because of the potential for camaraderie.

read more