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Introducing The Saturday Serial—An Ongoing Management & Leadership Case

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!

By |2016-10-22T17:11:10-05:00February 7th, 2015|Decision-Making, Leadership, Management Innovation, Marketing, Product Management, Project Management, Strategy|0 Comments
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Helping the Senior Management Team Find Its Voice

I’m convinced one of the key limiting factors of management team effectiveness is the discomfort these high-powered functional experts have in talking with each other. While there are few quiet senior management team meetings, the words exchanged tend to be more about functional updates and carefully worded ideas or collegial debate over direction or investments than they are about the real issues confronting the firm. Here are 5 blocking and tackling ideas to help senior executives strengthen their communication effectiveness as a team:

By |2016-10-22T17:11:11-05:00December 16th, 2014|High Performance Management Teams, Project Management|0 Comments
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Art of Managing—How to Respond When the Experiment Goes Wrong

In the most successful firms I’ve been around, the managers actively promote experimentation and learning as core to everyone’s job. Yet, it’s not the words on the wall or even the words that come out of their mouths about experimentation, it’s the actions they take when things go horribly wrong that fosters the effective learning environment. Here are 3 counter-intuitive ideas for turning project failures into lessons learned that stick:

By |2016-10-22T17:11:14-05:00June 30th, 2014|Art of Managing, Leadership, Leading Change, Management Innovation, Project Management|0 Comments
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Why Workplace Teams Struggle—And What to Do About It

Many workplace teams I observe are not much better than the typical nightmarish college class group project that most of us have lived through at one time or another. Here are 4 big reasons why workplace teams struggle and 9 ideas to help you do something about it:

By |2016-10-22T17:11:14-05:00April 28th, 2014|Art of Managing, High Performance Management Teams, Leadership, Leading Change, Management Innovation, Project Management|0 Comments
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Just One Thing—Cultivate Your Project Leadership Skills

Understanding the discipline and tools of project management is now de rigueur for professionals with any intention of growing in their careers. However, when I take a close look at project teams that struggle (and too many do), it’s generally not the misapplication of project management tools or practices that are at the source of the problems. Most often, it’s the absence any visible form of project leadership.

By |2016-10-22T17:11:15-05:00April 1st, 2014|Just One Thing, Leadership, Project Management|5 Comments
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New Leader Tuesday—4 Big Benefits of Coaching Your Teams

Too often and with the best of intentions, we assemble a team of our best and brightest to tackle an important issue and then assuming our job is done and the task is in the hands of these capable people, we step away and wait for the results. And all too often, instead of something magical, what we get back looks and feels a lot like flailing heading towards failing. Here are 4 big reasons why assigning a coach to your project team might be the difference between success and failure:

By |2016-10-22T17:11:15-05:00February 25th, 2014|Leadership, Project Management|1 Comment
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Leadership Caffeine™—Breakaway Leadership Part 2

Post number 1 in this series focused on the behaviors that often stifle the pursuit of moving into a new area while sustaining the legacy business. In this post, we look at 8 behaviors and approaches that YOU and your management counterparts directly control that contribute to success with this challenging endeavor:

By |2016-10-22T17:11:15-05:00February 23rd, 2014|Art of Managing, High Performance Management Teams, Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Leading Change, Management Innovation, Product Management, Project Management, Strategy|0 Comments
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Leadership Caffeine™—Exploring Breakaway Leadership, Part 1

If you’ve lived through a successful migration of a business from a legacy market to a new world, you know that it’s a sometimes messy, often emotionally turbo-charged experience. Here are 8 leadership behaviors that are guaranteed to create "tripping points" for any organization or team striving to breakaway from the past:

By |2016-10-22T17:11:15-05:00February 10th, 2014|Art of Managing, High Performance Management Teams, Leadership, Leadership Caffeine, Leading Change, Management Innovation, Project Management, Strategy|2 Comments
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From the Archives: 5 Priceless Lessons from Amundsen and Scott

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

By |2016-10-22T17:11:16-05:00January 5th, 2014|Decision-Making, Leadership, Project Management|0 Comments
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