Some days you’ll be part of meetings and you’ll be trying to drive change while everyone around you is talking about driving people. Don’t give in to the peer pressure to drive people. Raise the standards of the group. Drive change. People will notice and they will be grateful for your example. Why not try?
The speed of change follows the form of the change. If you form a team of forced conscripts (the voluntold) and give them a vague purpose, you’ve built yourself a horse and buggy. Top speed: 30-40 miles per hour If you form a team from the voluntold and give them a compelling purpose, you’ve built
This week’s theme seems to be education: what it is and what it has done to us. Watch this RSA Animates video on changing education paradigms then dig into Seth Godin’s Stop Stealing Dreams. We’ve got a tough job ahead of us when we’re trying to drive change, trying to initiate something, trying to make
Considering their education Read More »
Have you ever gone to a day or two of training and felt overwhelmed by all you’ve just learned? How can you possibly implement all the great ideas crammed into your brain? You can’t. Here’s my tip: Pick one. Next time you go to training, pick one (just one!) thing to do right away when
During a class on Friday I was reminded of a very important point: Your team needs a real purpose, something big worth accomplishing that you can only do together. Without a purpose, team’s don’t necessarily dissolve. Usually they do something far worse: they continue meeting but their goal (unstated, of course) is their own comfort.
What’s your purpose? Read More »
How much must you polish a new idea before you can share it in your organization? How perfect must your Power Point slides be? How redundant your connections to top management? How detailed your diagrams? As you polish, perfect, over-engineer and detail out your idea, the costs of worry pile up: lost time, opportunities and
Overcoming the Costs of Worry Read More »
I just love it when I’m on the same wavelength with Dr. Kotter, author of Leading Change and the famous 8 Step Process. Once again, he and I posted about the same topic only days apart. [See his post and mine from Nov 2010.] Yesterday, I posted about the need to refill the tank, in
Just Stop Some Things Read More »
With a quick Google search you can find page long lists of blog posts dedicated to complaining about meetings. I challenge you to find another blog post like this. Why is this post unique? Because I intend not to complain about meetings, but about the word meeting itself. As of today, I’ve given up the
Down with Meetings! Read More »
To start off 2012 right I created this one page pdf to illustrate the difference between driving people and driving change. Those of you who’ve seen earlier versions will notice the old figures have been replaced with my not-so-awesome-but-still-lively stick figure people. (I’m an engineer, not an artist, so go easy on me.) If you’d
