Stuck between mediocrity and excellence

Do you open your email, scan the subject lines, and then close your email-- only to open it back up again?  Are there emails that you should have responded to weeks ago that are important, and they are now lost?  Does the thought of the shear volume of email that you have to look through cause anxiety?  If any of these symptoms apply, you are probably suffering from email paralysis.  One solution: Delete EVERYTHING . If the email was truly important, you would have responded or read it by now.  Another solution:  Grab some coffee, a Monster or Red Bull, and saddle up. It's time to GTD it and start using a system to process your inbox.  Turn of the distractions like Lync or IM. Turn off the text messages.  The second solution doesn't guarantee that email paralysis will strike again.  More than likely it will, unless you seek therapy.  The first step is admitting that you have a problem in the first place. 

A general rule is that for every pocket of excellence in an organization there will be a corresponding pocket of mediocrity.  If your company is great at sales and marketing, then it's probably not so great at operations.  Just like people have strengths and weaknesses, organizations have not only core competencies, but competencies that could be categorized as "needs improvement." To understand whether you work in either a pocket of excellence or one of mediocrity take a good look at the leaders in the company. Is it a team of people with complimentary skill sets?  Or is everyone a better clone of the other?  Take a look at the business model. Basic, I know. But if the only people you see running the organization are "sales people" without any deep content, you have a pretty good idea of what the organization thinks its pocket of excellence is.  Alternatively, if your current leader recently came from IT, or he or she came from operations, then you ...

You are in hell because people around you think differently than you do.  You are in hell because everything that you read is counter to what you are experiencing.  You are in hell because you know the kind of environment that you thrive in because you've been there.  You are in hell because you consciously chose to work in this environment and be in this place. How much did you give up?  How do you get out?  Do you change your mindset or get out of the environment?  There's not an easy answer.  There's no easy decision. The worst thing you can do is to continue to think about it. 

When big organizations look to make a dent in their cost structure, a common strategy is to move to a managed services agreement for back office functions.  Over the years, I've seen a couple of instances where a company inks a deal with major IT outsourcing outfits to provide support, application development, and maintenance capabilities.  The benefits of this are numerous - instant impact to the bottom line, variable capacity that can be flexed depending on the demand, and single throats to choke for delivery accountability.  If you measure the success of moving to managed services purely on bottom line impact, laying off cumulative decades of institutional knowledge and replacing them with twice as many people that have to learn the business makes perfect sense. However, is the impact to the bottom line the right measure of success? Now, instead of hours to make a code change, it takes weeks--of which half of that time is because of the new process. ...

For those of you that have read The Lean Startup by Eric Ries, the terms MVP (Minimum Viable Product) and pivot will be all too familiar. The idea behind a MVP is that you create something quickly that validates your hypotheses behind the product that you are developing. If you are like me and have worked in large organizations, the idea of a MVP is terminology repeated but never digested. You either build Frankenstein or you don't. By the time your Frankenstein of a product is developed and deployed, it's NOTHING like what you envisioned.  You are just happy that you got it to work.  The other term, pivot, refers to the point where you realize that it's time to change direction and do something different. Here are a number of examples of famous pivots .  All of which make sense because these companies went on to become success stories. Nobody remembers the companies that pivoted to their day of doom.  When you think pivot, think Andy Grove du...

I was listening to an audio clip on how to think strategically by Carissa Figgins  via Predictable Success.  In it, she describes a 4 step process to think strategically.  My favorite part of what she says about thinking strategically is to get to what you don't know you don't know - or your "DK DK."  To get to your DK DK, you have to lay out what you know you know - your KK - and what you know you don't know - your KDK.  This where a lot of your key questions come from. It's the quality of your questions that drive how well you strategically think.  So for all of you that think that you have to go to HBS in order to think strategically, think again.  Each and everyone of you has the ability to think strategically. Whether it's a life strategy, a career strategy, or a strategy to raise your kids.  Some "thing" is driving how you execute.  Or maybe not... 

When you work in an organization that historically lacks accountability for following processes, you can get thrown for a loop when processes are all of a sudden enforced.  It is easy to say that leaders and managers need to hold people accountable to the processes that matter.  Accountability leads to consistency.  Consistency leads to reliability.  However, when the inmates have run the asylum for a while, accountability is going to meet resistance head on. As much as people want to follow a process, they also want their autonomy too. Once everyone decides they want to institute and enforce a process, that autonomy is taken away.  And now instead of inmates running the asylum to get things done, we end up in complete organizational standstill.  Managers try to enforce new processes. Everybody else is figuring out ways to get around the processes because that's how to get things done.  Before you decide to institute a culture of pr...