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22 February 2012 0 Comments

It is what you do that counts!

Recently I have met several people that appear to have an expectation of salary simply because of their position and tenure with their firm. At this time of year, most firms will have completed their annual salary and bonus reviews and their employees are either generally happy or mostly unhappy. It is so difficult to [...]

10 February 2012 2 Comments

Keeping Your Eyes on the Horizon

There is an old American Indian saying from the Zuni people: “Walk tall as the trees.” I interpret this as “Keep your head up when you walk.” Clearly, the horizon is infinitely more interesting than your feet but what is really being said?
After thinking about the Zuni saying, I realised that when you walk with [...]

8 February 2012 4 Comments

From little acorns do mighty oaks grow

My grandmother had lots of “little quotes”. While growing up we used to wait for her to produce one of her favourites before pulling her leg about it. We never really understood that she was instilling her values in to us, her grandchildren, in her own gentle, non-intrusive, way.
A few days ago I came across [...]

7 February 2012 4 Comments

Defining an Organisation’s Culture

A few days ago, Frank Sonnenberg (www.franksonnenberg.com) wrote an article entitled Leadership: Promoting Beliefs and Values. He stated that great leaders never miss an opportunity to reinforce their organisations beliefs and values because it is these beliefs and values that form the core of an organisations culture. Quite rightly he goes on to posit that [...]

6 February 2012 7 Comments

How emotional contagion disrupts a firm’s culture

As leaders we constantly watch over and protect the culture we have so carefully built within the firm. We focus on finding functional ways to build the morale within our team but are we always aware of the less obvious forces that can be so disruptive as to reverse all of this careful, painstaking work?
Wharton [...]

3 February 2012 6 Comments

Understanding Your Desired Outcome

I often talk about envisioning the desired outcome and working backwards from there. What steps do you need to take at each level in order to achieve the desired result? When we are building a sales strategy for a major account, we always try to work back from the green light decision in order to [...]

2 February 2012 2 Comments

Process Excellence and Leadership Excellence

There is a very good short video on YouTube posted by The Process Excellence Network entitled Welcome to the Process Excellence Revolution. The video describes Process Excellence as “improving the way that businesses create and deliver value to customers.” As the leader of a centre of excellence for Business Process Management, I can identify with [...]

1 February 2012 0 Comments

Making Connections

For a while now, I have been working on increasing my network and establishing myself a reputation as an entrepreneurial thought leader. Many of you that have followed me on Twitter and read my blogs over the past year or so will see that I have grown and learnt a lot since I first dipped [...]

30 January 2012 2 Comments

Motivation and Retention Strategies

Four years ago, I received a copy of the HBR article “Employee Motivation: A Powerful New Model” by Nitin Nohria, Boris Groysberg and Linda-Eling Lee and found it to be a powerful missive on employee motivation.
The model opines that employees have four drivers that affect their motivation:

The drive to Acquire
The drive to Bond
The drive to Comprehend
The drive [...]

27 January 2012 0 Comments

Strategic Planning, Lean and Agile?

Yesterday I followed a tweet by @JesseLynStoner that pointed to an interesting blog post entitled Strategy-Towards Hypotheses, Experiments, Involvement & Learning by @artpetty. Since Jesse is my new favourite author (see my recent blog posting Big Rocks where I discuss Jesse’s book Full Steam Ahead)! I naturally followed the link. I found Art’s article both [...]