Tag: Leadership

Annual Ritual

First episode of two looking into the annual ritual of performance reviews. This episode focuses on the process, and why it doesn’t have to be painful. If you’re willing to do it all the time.

Duck and Cover

How a brutal performance review meeting ended with me getting a stapler hurled at my head. And how that lead to one of my most steadfast rules: in the workplace, no surprises.

The Brainpower Age

How a simple question about failure of a single project lead to the most important research project of my life. And how that lead to the realization that everything about work has changed in the last few generations. We’ve entered the Brainpower Age.

The Hit Man

Introducing the Leading Smart podcast -- How a job in the car stereo business ended up being mostly about firing people. And how that lead to a lifelong fascination with management, organizations, and team building.

On Time

The flop sweat caught me off guard. Driving to a doctor’s appointment, I was running just a couple minutes late. Yet I was filled with panic and driving like a jerk, darting from lane to lane and cursing people for driving too slowly. This for an appointment I was paying [...]

The Why Matters

When working with Brainpower workers, companies are finding out that the “why” matters. I noted it in the foundational explanation of The Brainpower Age, and more companies are feeling the effect. Today’s New York Times writes about tech workers who want to know “What are we building this for?” Employees [...]

Visions of a License

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 [...]

Lose the Bad Apples

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 [...]

How NOT to Quit

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 [...]

Quick, Cut the Good People

New Yorker – April 30, 2007 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 [...]