Keep presentations simple, it should make sense to a five year old, without treating your audience like a five year old.
9 Signs of a Losing Organization
- Fuzzy Vision: corporate vision and mission don’t inspire people; lack of strategic alignment ; people don’t know where the organization is going and what it is trying to achieve in the future.
- Lack of Leadership Skills: fear of change; leaders lack entrepreneurial spirit; leadership style on the part of management is either too directive or too hands-off; managers do not lead, they just administrate and micromanage; weak leadership development program.
- Discouraging Culture: no shared values; lack of trust ; blame culture; focus on problems, not opportunities; people don’t have fun at work; diversity is not celebrated; failures are not tolerated; people lose confidence in their leaders and systems.
- High Bureaucracy: bureaucratic organizational structures with too many layers; high boundaries between management layers; slow decision making; too close monitoring of things and subordinates; too many tools and documents discouraging creative thinking; bureaucracy is tolerated.
- Lack of Initiative: poor motivation and encouragement; people do not feel their contributions make a difference; management fails to engage the organization effectively; people work defensively and not creatively, they do their job, and nothing more.
- Poor Vertical Communication: people have no clue of the big picture and do not feel that their contributions are important; too much uncertainty; people don’t know what top-managers are thinking and planning.
- Poor Cross-functional Collaboration: functional mindset; lack of cross-functional goals and cross-functional collaboration spirit; functional, no enterprise-wide business process management; no cross-functional management committees; lack of or powerless cross-functional teams.
- Poor Teamwork: no organizational commitment to team culture; lack of shared and worthwhile goals; weak team leaders; team members who don’t want to play as part of a team are tolerated; teams are too large; lack of shared rewards.
- Poor Idea and Knowledge Management: cross-pollination of ideas is not facilitated; no idea management and knowledge management strategies and systems; “know-it-all” attitude; “not invented here” syndrome.
Progress + momentum = confidence. The moment you see yourself tackle the smallest part of the impossible task, the quieter the Critic (your internal voice) becomes because you’re slowly proving him wrong.
Simon Sinek: How great leaders inspire action. Similar to Jim Collins’s Hedgehog Concept.
Hedgehog Concept By Jim Collins. Hedgehog concept is finding the intersection of the following circles:
- Understanding what you are deeply passionate about?
- Understanding what you can be best in world at and equally understanding what you cannot be best in the world at?
- Understanding what drives your economic engine? Understanding one ratio above all other ratios … profit per X … understanding what X can give you highest ROI?
Please stop waiting for a map. We reward those who draw maps, not those who follow them.
Seth Godin (via wellsaidblog)
How to Think Creatively
Not a recipe but rather tips on using the right brain.
A manager’s job is to take what skills they have, the ones that got them promoted, and figure out how to make them scale. They do this by building a team that accentuates their strengths and, more importantly, reinforces where they are weak.
Seth Godin: write something down everyday.
Good management is the art of making problems so interesting and their solutions so constructive that everyone wants to get to work and deal with them.
Paul Hawken, Natural Capitalism
This lively RSAnimate, adapted from Dan Pink’s talk at the RSA, illustrates the hidden truths behind what really motivates us at home and in the workplace.
One of your many jobs as manager is information conduit, and the rules are deceptively simple: for each piece of information you see, you must correctly determine who on your team needs that piece of information to do their job.
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