Every team has a renegade. They refuse to follow the prevailing wisdom – and that’s a good thing, even if they annoy everyone along the way. If you were a honeybee, finding nectar would be your prime objective. The entire hive depends on it, and so there is the equivalent of an advanced team. That team surveys the area and brings back intel. The recon bees make their reports in the form of “waggle dances“. Those waggle dances are expert guidance for the hive’s foragers—the large groups of honeybees who find and retrieve nectar. Imagine if your company had experts who could tell you how to solv ..read more

Every founder has a vision of his product or company. A fully fledged brand, beloved by its masses of customers and admirers. It could be the amazing AI-enabled SaaS platform that is taking the world by storm—or, the dream of opening a bar that becomes the local watering hole, full of neighbors and friends! Some visions leave us breathless with wonder and awe. In 2002, when Elon Musk founded SpaceX, for some, it was a moving and likely next step for humanity. For others, it was a fantasy. Of course, Musk has succeeded in achieving milestone after milestone over the years, and so, the cred ..read more

Organizations own a tremendous amount of information–some trivial and some critical. Whether a shoe store or a 10-person startup; an ad agency or a car dealership—every organization has tons of information. But storing shared information is a problem.  How do you find what you need? Or, often, how do find out what you need? And if you are lucky enough to know what you need and where it resides, how do you find the right version of it?  As companies scale, this knowledge chaos intensifies. Early-stage priorities like sales and product development take precedence over organiz ..read more

Have you ever had a boss who simply wouldn’t listen to your perspective? Maybe they dismissed you despite tons of supporting evidence that you might be right! Experience does eventually yield expertise and credibility. That brings a lot of perks. Novices look to those “old-hands” for guidance, and we all benefit from the wisdom of more experienced peers. But it’s easy to become closed-minded and arrogant; to use experience as a justification not to listen or learn. The Wolf of Rubbermaid Rubbermaid was born as the Wooster Rubber Company in 1920. Over the ensuing decades, the company would weat ..read more

I am guessing that like me, you believe in the importance of deep work. And because of that, you too are in a never-ending battle against context-shifting. We know it costs us precious cognitive energy and time. In part one of this two-article series I pointed out that we can choose to love interruptions. Instead of resisting changes in our day, we can ride the wave of unexpected demands like a surfer—with curiosity, excitement and even equanimity! But we are still left with the need to produce excellent work—for which we must focus. And if context-shifting is cognitively so costly that we can ..read more

Newton understood something profound about matter –and it is equally true for human systems and behavior. In any system, over time, entropy increases. It applies in our organizations, our strategies, and our lives. In general, whether a company or your closet, something that is organized will lose its order over time. And the more disorganization there is, the more energy is diverted away from the system’s intended purpose. But the way disorganization happens is random. In fact, the very nature of entropy is random. If you buy a new bicycle every component has been expertly machined to minimiz ..read more

Most strategy off-sites deliver a sense of cohesion for the participants –and a slightly edifying town hall for everyone else. But few go the distance of becoming the guiding document for every employee. But a robust strategic plan should be the foundation for every decision.  In the first two parts of this 3-article series, we touched on the critical content that most strategic plans lack—that is, a clear statement of their differentiator—the strategic theory.  Article 2 dug into all the different traits that a great strategic plan needs to perform and why most of the com ..read more

Most employees can’t make good strategic choices about how best to spend their time. The best employees will try to devise ways to increase their value to the enterprise. But without being able to refer to a clear strategic plan, they are only guessing. Of course, they know how their work is measured–the targets they must hit. But what about the strategy and how they fit into it? Not likely. That makes weighing options—or inventing new ways to add value—almost impossible. I hear endless frustration from my CEO clients about this issue—that their employees don’t get “it”. But h ..read more

Happy New Year! No doubt, you are rushing to secure the location for your strategic planning off-site! It occurred to me recently that as much as I write and think about strategy, I have never actually described how to do strategic planning! WTH? I wrote a whole book on the stuff—and not one article? So, my first order of action in 2024 is to correct that. This is part one of a two-article series on leading a strategic planning event. And even if you are never called upon to do so, this is for you. Why? Because you will attend a ton of these over your career. It’s important to understand ..read more

I had a completely different article nearly ready to go, and then… I got distracted by the call of pie dough.  Of course, you realize it’s nearly Thanksgiving here in the US. And so, our minds turn to feasts, and for me, baking, unexpected fruit combinations, and unusual ways to package root vegetables and autumn apples in flaky pastry. But, of course, Thanksgiving is really about gratitude. While I’ve never been a crusader for gratitude journals, many of my clients use them. I have tried it myself and enjoyed the exercise. But it never stuck as a long-term habit. I think that’s beca ..read more