The view on the role of Manager is a relic of yesterday’s thinking and practice in management. It’s an industrial revolution hangover that is ripe for retirement to a museum display. The label and old meaning don't hunt in a digital world.
Given the recent storms and polar-like weather in the Midwest and Northeast, it seems fitting to revisit the priceless management and leadership lessons gleaned from Amundsen and Scott in their race to 90-degrees south. These lessons never grow cold!
Today’s management literature is filled with references to speed. If we’re following the trends, we’re all growing more “agile” and likely “lean” in the process. We’re working in “sprints” and “bursts,” and of course, we’re “teaming” whenever possible. All of this motion may be helping our waistlines, dancing moves and cardio health, but I’m not convinced that speed is always the right answer. Sometimes you just have to slow down to go faster. Here are 4 key situations where pausing before acting makes good business sense:
With few exceptions that I’ve encountered, most senior leaders lose sleep over how fast their organizations and employees are moving. Their minds and mantras are: faster to change, faster to improve, faster to add new capabilities, faster to explore and develop competence in new markets and with new customer groups. However, at the same time senior leaders are looking for ways for their firms and teams to move faster, most employee groups and their managers are bogged down slogging through the reality of getting stuff done. Here are 3 ideas to help you and your team strengthen the balance between the need for speed and the need for performance:
I’ve been mildly surprised that the book, Beyond Performance-How Great Organizations Build Competitive Advantage by Scott Keller and Colin Price, hasn’t commanded more attention in mainstream business circles. Perhaps we’ve grown numb to the almost endless number of books purporting to show us the way to sustained success. However, don’t let the existence of 25,000 or so books published on managing change during the past two decades, blind you to some of the important and data-backed conclusions of Beyond Performance. Here are some reasons why this may be one of the more important books you will read this decade:
We waste fortunes inside our organizations on misguided programs and oddball incentives, seeking ways to motivate and inspire people to work hard, innovate, create, care and to live up to their potential, when the real solution is literally on the tip of our tongues. Here are 5 ideas for curing Context Deficit Disorder:
I started this book series to share the insights and approaches of some truly sharp people on solving vexing business problems. This particular interview with Gary Harpst, author of, Six Disciplines Execution Revolution and the earlier Six Disciplines for Excellence, taps into Gary's hard won, practical experience and his great ideas on helping small and mid-sized businesses deal with strategy execution. Enjoy the thoughtful, actionable and experience-tested guidance from Gary in our podcast interview!
I’ve written on the topic of Strategy Fueled Leadership several times, and fresh off of a great podcast interview with Gary Harpst, author of Six Disciplines Execution Revolution (stay tuned for my posting) and my recent interview with Jocelyn Davis for Strategic Speed, I am on my soapbox again. It is critical to link leadership with strategy and vice-versa and the failure to do this is one of the root causes of strategy and execution failure in organizations.
As a long-time, self-described zealot for the importance of project managers developing as leaders, imagine how excited I was to learn about a conference devoted to just this topic! I’ve written at length in this blog (Learning to Lead in the Project Focused World and others) and even offered up my e-book, Leadership and the Project Manager, in support of this concept. I’m even more excited to be a part of the conference as a guest keynote as Project Leadership Forum kicks-off on Thursday in Harrisburg, PA.
Jocelyn R. Davis and Tom Atkinson offer some compelling thoughts on strategy in their article, "Need Speed? Slow Down," in the May, 2010 Harvard Business Review. They describe the concept of strategic speed as one of reducing the time it takes to create value. While “reducing time” might sound like speeding up, their research results suggest the opposite.
