Readers of my blogs will know that I am an avid reader. I’ve just made my way through ‘Do more great work’ by Michael Bungay Stanier. It’s a misleadingly small book! It looks small, and from the outside could be mistaken as the kind of book that you can wiz through. But it’s taken me …
Building strong personal career paths – do you have a case study to share? Read More »
Knowledge management and creativity/ innovation enhance project management. I am a firm believer in the value of knowledge management to enhance project management. I also believe that the use of formal structures, such as those advocated in Lean and Six Sigma (or process improvement), and project management, give people more rather than less scope for …
‘Topgrading’ by Bradford D Smart1, is a wonderful testament to the existence of talented individuals who can also ‘work smarter’, ‘deliver higher quality work’, ‘demonstrate greater team work’, and ‘find ways to get the job done in less time and with less cost’. Smart argues that it’s the proportion of ‘A’ players in an organisation …
“Topgrading”: it’s possible to be talented AND be an effective team player Read More »
As Stephen R. Covey, Bob Whitman and Breck England point out, in their one-hundred-and-ten page “Predictable results in unpredictable times”1: “in bad times, the distractions are more severe than ever… As people get laid off, the survivors have more to do. The distractions pile up to the sky as the economy grows rougher…” In our …
Approaches for building strong quality foundations are well documented in the manufacturing industry, but also occur across all business sectors and types of organisation such as flight airlines, the navy, health services, pharmaceutical research & development and education systems. Steven Spear, in ‘Chasing the Rabbit’1 discusses, with examples from the above, how this quality foundation …
‘Fake Work’, by Brent Peterson and Gaylan Nielson is an excellent dissertation on a common cause of frustration and wasted time and effort at work. According to the authors’ research, 53% of workers believe that they do work that does not count, and 54% feel that their creativity, talent and intelligence is under-used. Unfortunately fake …
Fake work – a real opportunity to enhance team effectiveness Read More »
In a previous blog “There’s more to decision making than meets the eye… or why we shouldn’t dismiss gut feelings“, inspired by Malcolm Gladwell’s book ‘Blink’1, I made a case for the discretionary use of intuition in decision making. I argued that: There seems to be a particular role for intuition when: a) encountering very …
The problem with relying on intuition for process improvement and decision making. Read More »
‘Simply putting clever people together does not make a team’, and, ‘There are many examples of extremely bright and talented groups that signally underperform’. So say Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones in ‘Clever. Leading your smartest, most creative people.’ (1) This book, which Elisabeth Goodman, principal consultant at RiverRhee Consulting, picked up as a result …
When Alan Payne, then Director of Kodak’s European Research team, found out that his 25 strong Cambridge unit was to close in early 2009, he spotted an opportunity that was to prove irresistible. He suggested to one of the US business heads that they could continue the project they had been working on, outside of …
Deep Visuals Ltd – how Kodak’s knowledge assets did not quite ‘walk out of the door’ Read More »
