Stuck between mediocrity and excellence

There are certain things that you take for granted when working for a corporation or a well run business.  These are usually the things that everyone complains about. They include: Processes and procedures Performance reviews HR policies HR in general. (ha) Templates and forms (e.g., expense reports) Management meetings Required training Etc...  As much as these things take us away from "doing our job," they are part of our job and are necessary to keep a company from becoming a big pile of mass chaos. The foundation of a company has to be stable and part of that foundation includes having a set of standards to live by.  No standards = inmates running the asylum.  No standards = inconsistency.  As Jim Collins said,  "The signature of mediocrity is not unwillingness to change; it's chronic inconsistency."  Businesses are made up of people.  People, by nature, are unique and variable.  Without anything...

Back in the dark ages when I was in business school, I decided to enter a supply chain case competition with a couple of classmates.  As a side note, both of those classmates are now supply chain PhDs.  It's safe to say that I was the not the smartest one on the team. My love for business books existed way back then. I vividly remember working long hours with my teammates and using strategic frameworks that weren't business school standard issued.  I figured that if we were going to win this thing, we should use something that would differentiate us from the other teams.  In this case, it was content provided by the book  Profit Patterns  by Moser, Mundt, Quella, and Slywotzky.  It was coming down to crunch time and I was spewing textbook rhetoric from the book for our case presentation. We were entering that period of working as a team where tensions were running high because of the time crunch and we had nothing in the form of a coherent s...

I was sitting in a class being led by Barry Deutsch  that addressed hiring and retaining talent.  I'm going to say that what I took away from the class is not what he wanted me to take away. That said, I still found the session entertaining because the look of fear from the people in the class around what he wanted them to do was priceless.  In one of our discussions on people, he talked about employees that have the case of the E and E's - Explanations and Excuses . (I love when speakers come up with a mnemonic or something catchy that resonates with a current situation that I am in). Everyone that reads this knows the type of people I'm talking about. Or, if you work in an environment that is solution driven and has a high caliber of talent, you have no idea what I'm talking about. I salute you.  When dealing with people that have a case of the E and E's, the easy thing to do is avoid them. I mean, if you keep going to the doctor and he has no cure as to ...