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On the way to the gym this morning I heard a radio ad that I’ve heard several times before.  It’s from the International Star Registry.  It’s a mind-boggling scam.
These people offer the chance to “name a star”, and tout it as a “great gift” — “a gift that will last […]

People often make New Year’s Resolutions — personal goals to remake themselves.  Most often these involve quitting smoking (as I did 30+ years ago) or losing weight (as I need to) or other self-improvement goals.  But they almost never involve their work life.  I’m here to beseech you otherwise.
This seems […]

It’s an ancient theme of comedians, as old as comedy itself.  It goes something like:

A woman marries a man expecting he will change, but he doesn’t.
A man marries a woman expecting that she won’t change, and she does.

It’s told many different ways, but the essence is that many people have […]

There is a great article in the Wall Street Journal today [Note: I believe this link is subscription-only].
The title of the article says it all: “When $70 Million is Not Enough”.  It is about how a star at Goldman Sachs, aptly named Mark McGoldrick (nicknamed “Goldfinger”), quit because he felt […]

I talk a great deal about visions.  About how they should drive organizations, about what they should contain, and about the importance they have on the effectiveness of teams.  I see many cases of strong, clear, focussed visions leading to great success.
And I see the opposite.  I see organizations that […]

Like many police departments these days, Seattle’s is under fire for the handling of a number of incidents, and the possibility that the officers overreacted.  I’m not going to dive into the depths of the argument over individual cases.  It is so hard to be sure of the facts, and […]

Mike Hargrove, the manager of the Seattle Mariners walked into work this morning as said “today is my last day as manager of the Seattle Mariners”.  To say this was a shock would be a vast understatement.
The thing that was most curios about the announcement was his reasoning.  He said: […]

Here’s a quiz for you: who has more retail outlets — Starbucks or General Motors (GM)?
If you listen to all the late night comics with their shtick on Starbucks and how there’s one on every corner, you think you know the answer.  Well, you’d be wrong.  Starbucks has about 6,300 […]

If you’ve followed along with this blog, you know a couple of things:

It’s past time for some sort of recognition for the one year anniversary, and
I’ve been quite remiss in posting over the last month or so.

As to the former, I say: “bah humbug!”  I have grown weary of reading […]

Once in a while, as a manager, you will be fortunate enough to have a team member who is a superstar.  These people are not just above average, they are vastly better.  They are smarter, more driven, highly focused, and they get far more work done than the rest.  It […]

Recently, a good friend of mine told me the story of a sick performance review and reward system.  I mean “sick” as ill, broken, maybe even sickening — not “sick” as the youth today refer to something really cool.
The system bases rewards on the performance feedback from those around the […]

A good friend of mine is part of the senior management team for the Boeing 787 “Dreamliner” project.  As a student of project management, I love to catch up with him every now and then to discuss this unbelievably complex endeavor.
While I’ve been up-close-and-personal to tremendously large and complex projects […]

The current issue of the New Yorker has an interesting article this week entitled “It’s the Workforce, Stupid!”.  The article highlights the short-sidedness of companies that layoff huge portions of their workforce in an effort to appease Wall Street and other critics.
Using the current examples of Citibank and Circuit City, […]

As I noted in this post, it’s annual report season again.  I just opened my Berkshire Hathaway annual report and once again was not the least bit disappointed.
The Berkshire report confirms, as it does every year, why I am a card-carrying, stock-owning, unabashed member of the Cult of Warren […]

It’s annual report season again, and with it comes the flood of plastic wrapped envelopes to our mailbox that carry the once-a-year bounty of glossy, over-polished, and saccharin manifestos from publicly traded firms.  This is “the art of the annual report”.
I look forward to this flood, it offers insights that […]

Today’s Wall Street Journal observes “Limits on Executive Pay: Easy to Set, Hard to Keep”.  It is just one more sign that as long as executives are rewarded for the wrong things, their pay will continue to spiral out of control.  It’s the “A-Rod’ing” of executive compensation.
In case you don’t […]

In the world of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) to me, one of the most frequent is “how do I get a job at Microsoft?”.  If I had a dime for every time I’ve been asked it, at parties, on the street, and especially when I post comments on the internet, […]

I’ve written about testing of employees before (see here and here), and it seems like a topic that just won’t go away.  The other day, I made a comment on Matt Mullenweg’s blog about hiring and age discrimination and such.  This prompted an email from someone on the cutting edge […]

Once again, I’m going to risk taking this blog into the political realm by discussing a current political controversy.  But, I promise, the emphasis here is not on the who, or the why, but rather the how.
Alberto Gonzales, the United States Attorney General, is in a lot of hot water […]

If you’ve been following along with me, you know that I’m a huge fan of clearing dead or diseased wood from your organization.  Nothing rots an organization more effectively than people who don’t carry their share of the load, or who complain all the time, or are jerks.  These people […]

A key component of being a good leader is being able to speak to the team in a way that is engaging, informative, and motivating.  Certainly, understanding the objectives, marshaling the resources, making good, timely decisions, and getting the job done are important aspects of leadership.  But I was reminded […]

I had to buy a new car yesterday.  Interesting that I said “had to”, isn’t it?  Pretty much sums up the state of the car buying experience these days.  Despite all the potential for fun — lots of new shiny toys, all the options in the world to choose from, […]

At the risk of venturing into a philosophical quagmire about various religions or value of faith in general, there is a trend afoot that makes me question the role of religion in the workplace.  I am struck by the ascendancy of new Christian movements into various secular portions of society […]

Since you’re reading this site about business, perhaps you’d be interested in reading a number of other blogs on business topics.  One of the best directories of this sort is the Blog Flux Business Blogs directory.

I find it fascinating to just troll through this directory looking for people with interesting […]

If you caught it on Oprah, or saw the spot on NBC’s Today Show, or have been blown over by any of the other noise, you’ve heard about “The Secret”.
The most hyped book / movie / phenomenon since “The DaVinci Code”, The Secret is (as the many web sites proudly […]

The New York Times Magazine had a wonderful cover story yesterday about Toyota and their path to world dominance.  This is a great read for most of corporate America, a modern day tale of the tortoise and the hare.
There are many interesting parts of this wonderful article, from the discussion […]

I was involved in a small business for a time.  It wasn’t tiny, with $4+m in revenues and about 30 employees, but it was small in that it was started by a young entrepreneur and still had plenty of headroom for growth.  The young leader was full of passion for […]

I get asked this question frequently.  Why is my résumé so important?  Why can’t I just impress the hiring person in the interview?  Why can’t people see past my rough résumé, and see me for who I really am?  In this internet day and age, does a silly old, outdated […]

I asked the question back in September: Does Alan Mulally (the new Ford CEO) have a better idea? Recently, he has answered the question definitively, and the answer is a resounding yes.
I complained a while back that Ford had just given up, lost creativity, and was basically flailing.  In […]

I have all kinds of anecdotal evidence that personality testing doesn’t work, but I’ve never had a case that I could talk about publicly, or that was so widely known that it would prove the point for me.  Today NASA came to my rescue.
If you haven’t read my thoughts on […]

Let me say this right from the top: there is no single more important factor to the success of a project than a clear, crisp, shared vision.  Period.  Now let me tell you why.

I have seen a lot of projects.  Big projects involving thousands of people over many years and […]

With the upcoming Super Bowl, a lot has been said about the two coaches: Indianapolis’s Tony Dungy and Chicago’s Lovie Smith.  Yes, the big story is that they are both the first African American coaches to take a team to the Super Bowl.  But I’m more fascinated with the fact […]

I’ve had a busy week for interactions with the service industry.  Three different cars spent time in the shop, and a beloved family pet spent his final days in a pair of vet clinics.  I’ve had far too many chances to see what makes these businesses tick.
Last things first, late […]

If you are in any kind of management position, there seem to be a million metrics to track.  You get huge pressure to track a number of financial metrics such as EBITDA, gross sales, net profit, and others, there are sales metrics divided up every which way (by territory, by […]

It’s been a very rough winter for us here in the Puget Sound area.  As I have noted previously, we’ve suffered wind, snow, rain, sleet, all resulting in power outages, school closings, and on and on.  At times it feels like we’re only missing pestilence to round out the collection.  […]

There has been more than a little noise about executive compensation in general, and stock option backdating in particular.  I have been quite vocal about the ridiculous level of CEO pay, it is just silly that people should be getting 9-digit pay — for anything including professional sports.  I have […]

Some smart accountant at Wal-Mart woke up one day recently and realized that, with 1.6 million “associates”, they spend a lot of money on people.  So, like any major employer, they decided to figure out ways to cut their costs on this huge expense.
However, unlike most other large employers, they […]

I have written more than a little about Home Depot and its CEO Bob Nardelli.  From their top-heavy “Culture Change Offensive” (which I found offensive here), and the silly army mentality Nardelli tried to force down everyone’s throat (and got stuck in my craw here), to Bob’s stunning pay package […]

The Wall Street Journal had a marvelous article [ed: unfortunately subscription-only] about the turnaround Alan Mulally is trying to make at Ford.  I have written about this before (see this post here), but put simply, I am a huge fan of Mr. Mulally.  He did great things at Boeing, and […]

There has been quite a bit of hubbub lately over the end-of-year bonuses paid by Goldman Sachs.  It even provoked an op-ed piece in the venerable New York Times.  Totaling some $16.5 billion, and averaging $623,000 per employee, the payouts have set off a firestorm of shock, awe, envy, and […]

Back in 1991 I did a stint as the marketing director of Fox Software (the makers of FoxPro, the famous database system).  I had been involved in the technical area for several years, designing and coding the user interface for FoxPro, for example, but I wanted to try my hand […]

We live in the Pacific Northwest that, like most regions of the world, has natural disasters to worry about.  Every region of the world has some calamity on its potential horizon.  Be it hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, earthquakes, droughts, even plagues of locusts, it seems clear that no place is without […]

The Kresge Foundation is a great organization.  They seek to strengthen other non-profit organizations by helping them to grow and improve their operations.  It’s the philanthropic world’s version of the old Chinese proverb: “Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day.  Teach a man to fish […]

There are a number of ways to detect the “soul” of an organization.  Although it can be a lot of fun to get inside a company or group and understand the relationships, the culture, and the tone and tenor of the organization, I like to look at the obvious external […]

In a recent article in BusinessWeek magazine, Jack and Suzy Welch advocated active pruning of the jerks from your organization.  They said “nothing hurts a company more than when the bosses ignore, indulge, or otherwise tolerate a jerk.”
They go on to compare employees on two scales, performance and values.  They […]

One of the things I hear so often from leaders I’ve worked with is how quickly a casual comment of theirs got blown out of proportion.  It’s almost as if the simple, off-hand remark they made a couple of months ago grew legs and got a life of its own.
They […]

The world is not the same today.  My long time personal assistant, Jill, passed away last night.  She battled bravely against the cancer that started in her breast and eventually claimed her entirely.  At the completely unfair age of only 37.
I am a better person for having known her, having […]

One of the toughest parts of being a leader is walking the line between democracy and fascism.  When it comes to the essential elements of your mission, where does consensus become chaos, where does direction become dictatorship?  This is one of the most important questions of style managers face.
And the […]

Time, quality, price — pick any two.
When it comes to project management, truer words were never spoken.  I know it sounds like a tired old cliché that people trot out at the first sign of project difficulty.  And, sure, it sounds trite and even seems to violate my rant from […]

There are two kinds of people in the world: those who break the world into two kinds of people and those who don’t.
Yes, that’s a funny line.  It’s funny because it’s ironic to be sure, but like many things, it’s also funny because it is so true.

It seems like there […]