Stuck between mediocrity and excellence

Whether you are a running a supply chain or designing software, there is one thing that has to be true -- your operations and design must be focused on meeting customer requirements.  Whether it's a desired service level, an ease-of-usability, or just pleasure of doing business-- how you do things and what you deliver must make the customer happy.  So why do some organizations produce products that people aren't happy with?  As organizations grow, more people get involved in processes.  As more people get involved, a middle occurs where literally nothing gets done.  The middle is filled with meetings.  The middle is filled with no action items.  The middle is filled with executive charisma and management posturing. The middle has lost sight of the customer and has 20/20 vision when it comes to individual objectives.  It's this swirl in the middle that slows down overall progress -- puts a stop to organizational excellence if you ...

'Cause we all just wanna be big rockstars And live in hilltop houses driving fifteen cars ~ Rockstar by Nickelback In any performance review process, there will inevitably be words that consistently pop up when describing how an employee has performed.  For those that meet expectations, you'll hear words like "solid," or "dependable," or "reliable."  If you have always been in the top 15% of your class, these words are nice words to hear, but not the ones you want to hear in a performance evaluation.  For overachievers, these words put you smack dab in the middle of the bell curve. You are the average now.  The employees that are considered to walk on water, however, will consistently be described by one word, "rockstar."  At my old firm, the word was used so much that we actually removed it from the language of any future assessment.  A universal truth is that performance reviews will always have some degree of subjectivity...

When I was recruiting the best and brightest minds into management consulting, we always said that we wanted "out of the box" thinkers.  And then we wanted them to conform to the rules and methodologies of the Firm. Such is the irony.  I don't think it really hit me what out of the box meant until I watched a Project Innovation through Design Thinkin g webinar that was available for free on Stanford's Center for Professional Development site.  It presented a question that asked, "How much can you make with $5 and 2 hours?"  It turns out that the top 3 answers were this: One group thought like I did and framed the question as an investment one. They bought a bicycle pump and went out on campus to offer the pumping of tires for a fee. That really didn't catch on. So they changed their strategy and offered pumping tires for free, but asked for donations. They made considerably more by asking for donations than they did when charging  a fee.  An...

Performance reviews are viewed as a necessary evil.  HR needs documentation of your performance over time in the event hard decisions need to be made when it's time to cut staff.  Employees hate to hear negative feedback because after all, nobody is perfect. But the fact of the matter is that when performance reviews are done right, the employees are better off which directly affects the performance of the organization. How do you know if your performance review process isn't quite up to par?  Your fate has been predetermined. A old colleague of mine had a Japanese word for -- nemawashi--- these are the meetings before the meetings when the decision has been made on your rating and promotion. When these meetings go too far, it completely undermines the process if someone is doing their due diligence and trying to put together an objective view of an employee's performance.  There is zero accountability. If timelines come and go and nobody meets them when ...

A universal truth is that politics exist within every workplace environment.  You may read about workplaces like Zappo's and Menlo Innovations . And to many of us that read about these places, there is a certain degree of skepticism because we have experienced no such nirvana.  However, the truth is that such places exist and the leaders of these companies have learned to minimize or eradicate the office politics that can drag down the productivity or efficiency of a company. Worse, office politics can keep the organization from coming close to realizing it's potential.  In the majority of companies, office politics abound and it's primarily driven by the leadership that's in place.  Here's how to tell if you are dealing with a leader that is a political animal. This is dangerous, both for employees and the company. When talking to your peers about a person they either say, "Watch your back," or "He / she is dangerous."  Red flags sho...

That is how much Powerball is up to today. Ask yourself what you would do with that much money?  9 out of 10 of us would quit our job and do what we truly want to do.  But what exactly is that?  If I'm having a hard time answering that question, I'm sure a lot of other people would have a hard time answering it as well.   Every life or purpose coach is going to ask you, "If money were no object, what would you do?"  Write?  Volunteer?  Play golf?  At some point, acquiring material wealth is going to get old -- just ask my 4 year old that has every toy known to man and is still bored.  I think my answer would be to buy a company and see if I could run it. Then I could put all of the things that I rant about into practice.  What would you do? 

There was one of those motivational picture things on Linkedin that said,  A bad job with a good boss is better than a good job with a bad boss.  Then there's another one that says,  People don't leave companies, they leave bad leaders (or managers ).    Which one is it?  I agree with the Marcus Buckingham point of view that people have to like what they do.  When people like what they do, then who they work with becomes far more tolerable. For example, when I left a big Firm, I loved who I worked with and I liked what I did.  I developed many friendships and have seen many people that I have worked with become successful in their own right.  Along the ride, I had many leaders and managers that weren't very fun to work with. But the reason I stayed is that for the most part, I genuinely liked the people that I worked with.  For the majority of us, we are not exactly in a good job- we are in a job that is acceptable or t...