Management and Leadership

One of my favorite things to do in a presentation on collaboration was to ask people to define it. I'd offer up the idea that, much like trust, they probably thought they knew what it was that collaboration meant – right up to the point where they'd t...

I’ve spent a great deal of my professional career working on helping users collaborate in one form or another. I setup Local Area Networks (LANs) when they were still called that and not networks. I connected folks via email before the Internet was a...

No one is as smart as all of us – sometimes that’s very true and sometimes not. What makes people work together in a way where all their talents are expanded instead of diminished? That’s the idea behind Collaborative Intelligence: Thinking with People...

Like many people, I enjoy action movies where there are terrorists trying to wreck our world and the lone hero – or hero team – that are standing in the breach between the terrorists and our way of life. However, I’ve never really given much thought to wh...

In America, we’re supposed to appreciate the value of diversity, but this runs in conflict to the way that we actually behave. We associate only with people who are like us. We fill our organizations with people who are like us, because we’re more com...

If you look behind the curtains of any genius you’ll usually find hidden ways that they were propelled forward by previous discoveries or through their work with others to create something that they couldn’t have thought of on their own. Whether it’s the r...

How do we get productive work out of a group of people? Team Genius: The New Science of High-Performing Organizations seeks to answer this complex question. Instead of focusing on the big picture corporate strategy like Strategic Management , which...

You never really know what you’re going to get into in a war.  A young upstart country disrupted a global powerhouse in what we now call American Independence.  The tragedy of 9/11 triggered a reaction from the United States that was quick and powerful.  The ...

I have to let you in on a secret. I don’t do this blog for you.  Not that anyone could honestly say that they do a blog for one specific person other than themselves.  You see while I’m happy that you (hopefully) find value in this blog.  That isn’t ...

With seven children in the house, a wife, and people I work with, it feels like I move from one crucial conversation to another. It feels like I move from one conversation that is important to my relationship with someone to the next one. Certainly I’m n...

Years ago I met Paul Culmsee . He and I were speaking at a SharePoint best practices conference and we became fast friends – even though he lives halfway across the planet in Perth, Australia. Over the years we’ve had numerous early morning/late nigh...

Sometimes my book reviews take on a life of their own. While preparing for my review of Dialogue: The Art of Thinking Together , I started to gather some thoughts on one of the key aspects of dialogues, which is the impact of defensive routines. Before ...

I’ve written about Dialogue before. I initially summarized my thoughts from The Fifth Discipline  and Dialogue Mapping  in a post called Discussion and Dialogue for Learning . More recently I posted about one aspect of Dialogue in my post on Defensive Routine...

This is second in the three part series of blog posts about dialogue spawned by Dialogue . The first part was about Defensive Routines . In this post I’ll talk about the inner game of dialogue, what you and everyone else has to do to allow dialogue to ...

Getting along with others is the biggest challenge of our human existence.  Sure, there are easy conversations – but there are difficult ones, too.  Difficult Conversations: How to Discuss What Matters Most is a guidebook for walking through the con...

I’m about as far away from an ethnographer as you can get. I live in the heart of the United States and in the same home for over 20 years. And yet, I use ethnographic interviewing in one form or another every single week. How can it be that I’m not emb...

I’m always trying to improve my craft. As it pertains to my keynote and educational speaking, it’s not always easy to find people who can press me to improve. That’s why I took the standup comedy course years ago as I described in my post I am a Come...

When I first started reading about humility, I was struck by the idea "power held in service to others." Edgar Schein's Humble Inquiry: The Gentle Art of Asking Instead of Telling brings that power through asking questions. He proposes that when we're...

One of the problems I have with my blog – and I’m keenly aware – is that its text based. While I insert the occasional graphic, because of the logistics of the medium it’s difficult to get the level of images in the stories. I also find that I’m often try...

It’s easy to get wrapped up in big data, AI, and quantitative approaches to research and forget that there’s another dimension to research that is just as important as – if not more important than – the numbers that we seem to be driven by.  The Long...

Have you ever felt like you’re in a discussion where the other person isn’t following the rules of logic? Have you ever felt like you knew things were off but you weren’t sure exactly why? I’ve felt that way, and that’s why when the book Mastering Logical Fa...

What does a physicist have to say about dialogue? It turns out, if that physicist is David Bohm, a lot. Bohm’s work has been referenced from six of the books that I’ve already reviewed (Science and Pseudoscience in Clinical Psychology,   Dialogue: The A...

It’s not exaggeration to say that Joseph Campbell is a legend when it comes to mythology.  The book, The Power of Myth , comes from a series of interviews that Campbell did with Bill Moyers while Campbell was in his eighties.  The legendary journalist tha...

I’m no stranger to presentations. I’ve averaged over 50 presentations a year for several years now. So on average every week I’m getting in front of a crowd with the privilege of sharing my experience. As a natural consequence of so much presenting you’l...

Stories are narratives that help others put pieces together, and while many of the stories we encounter in the media and in the movies are fictional, the kinds of stories you’re implored to tell in Seven Stories Every Salesperson Must Tell are non-fictional.  Th...

I mentioned in my review of Presentation Zen  that I was looking for some input on how to structure my slides so that I could best leverage them in the studio. One of the other books I reached into for inspiration was Slide:ology . I had seen Nancy Du...

If you had a burning passion to write a novel, how would you do it? Starting from scratch and never having done it before, what steps would you take? The answer may lie inside of Story Genius: How to Use Brain Science to Go Beyond Outlining and Write ...

One of the things that I realized is that all humans have the innate ability to speak – save those unfortunate souls who are mute. Sometime shortly after our first birthday our vocabulary bursts forth and we begin our lifelong dance with speaking. Later w...

It became a joke.  It’s a simple response that started occurring about ten years ago.  It was “Thanks for the feedback.”  It’s a shortened version of the book title, Thanks for the Feedback: The Science and Art of Receiving Feedback Well .  The product...

I stumbled across Buster Benson’s work through the cognitive bias codex – a listing of 200 or so known cognitive biases. That led me to his book, Why Are We Yelling?: The Art of Productive Disagreement . I’ve read several books on conflict and disagr...

Socrates thought that books would do terrible things to our memories. Since the beginning of time, our knowledge had been passed on in the oral tradition of stories. These stories were memorized and repeated. They were handed down from generation to generation,...

In a world where the slightest provocation seems to send us spinning out of control, it’s critical to find a force that can stop the escalation and turn the tide on the waves of fear and anger. That force may well be civility. In Choosing Civility: Th...

What does it take to resolve a conflict?  How does one know if the conflict has been resolved or just driven underground?  These and other questions are at the heart of Conflict Resolved?: A Critical Assessment of Conflict Resolution .  From the philosophical to...

There’s an angry person standing in front of you, and you want to help them with their problem – but you can’t. You can’t not because you’re incapable of solving their problem, but instead because they won’t let you. They can’t get past their anger t...

You only have two options when you’re experiencing a problem and you want to change it.  You can exit the situation, or you can use your voice to try to try to change it.  In 1970, Albert Hirschman wrote Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in ...

I don’t like win-lose games. I don’t think they’re the right way to approach life, so it would make sense that I’d resist reading Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement Without Giving In . It feels like it’s about dominating and conquering the other ...

When you can look at the topic of conflict from the eyes of a hostage negotiator, you realize that it’s a unique opportunity. Few people have the role of hostage negotiator, and it seems like it’s a role that involves nerves of steel and powerful cha...

Conflicts are everywhere. They’re at home, at work, in our politics, and in our communities. Resolving Conflicts at Work: Ten Strategies for Everyone on the Job  focuses on only work conflicts but delivers real thinking and tools that can be used in ...

Every once in a great while, you get to experience serendipity – a happy accident.  In this case, we had asked Scott Warrick to review our book, and in the follow up we got to see his latest book, Solve Employee Problems Before They Start: Resolving Con...

“Freud had a point. He was, after all, a genius. You can tell that because people still hate him.” That’s what brought me to 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos . I’m a part of a list where folks discuss various aspects of positive psychology. A 20-pag...

There are no silver bullets – and even if there were, it wouldn’t be very safe to shoot them. The path to developing psychological safety isn’t easy, but Timothy Clark offers some practical steps and advice on how to build psychological safety in The 4 Stag...

What happens when you step out of Disneyland or Walt Disney World? You take the shuttles, monorail, or boats back to your vehicle… But what then? What happens after you’ve been to a place of magic and you come back to the “real world?” Do you bring a...

It's an uncomfortable conversation. There is a group of change practitioners who believe coaching is required to accomplish change. I'm not convinced. However, to investigate the premise a bit, I picked up The Coaching Habit: Say Less, Ask More &...

Leadership isn’t easy. It’s difficult, because leadership requires a great deal of strength. I don’t mean lift-a-car-off-a-child sort of strength. I mean the kind of strength to both understand who you are and be who you are. Brené Brown’s latest book, Da...

I read a lot of content on psychology. I love learning more about how people think. I am intrigued by different attempts to understand the human condition. However, I don’t find myself interested in studying the neurology of how the brain works. In Emotional In...

Nice guys finish last – or do they? This is at the heart of Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success . If you study people and sort them into categories of the most giving and those that are trying to wring out the very last ounce that l...

Sometimes you stumble over a book in a way that makes you believe that there’s some outside force – God or the higher power or whatever – and you decide you need to read it. Heroic Leadership: Best Practices from a 450-Year-Old Company That Changed the Wo...

Generally, I don’t read biographies.  For me, they’re boring.  However, Ed Stack became very interesting to me, so I decided that there must be more to him and his book, It’s How We Play the Game , than meets the eye –enough that it was a worthy investmen...

Learning how to grow a company is a difficult challenge. There’s never enough time and always too many problems. There’s always the gap between what you want to do and what you actually do accomplish. However, despite this some leaders manage to create not...

Sometimes, I get to know some truly amazing people. I get to spend time with other speakers and authors who have messages to share with the world. One of the people I’m privileged to know is JoDee Curtis and her team at Purple Ink . The latest book th...

The title is simple. The book is long. However, Leadership  is a comprehensive look at political leadership that James MacGregor Burns executes well. I’m not personally much of a fan of political books. However, as I read Leadership for the Twenty-First Cent...

Self-Esteem is something we’re pushing into our children. Dr. Spock’s guidance to parents in the 1950s led parents to work on a child’s self-esteem to the exclusion of proper discipline. Here’s what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi says in Finding Flow : “Dr. ...

It was during a conversation with a friend that Margaret Wheatley’s work first came up.  In speaking of the non-linear and chaotic effects of change, he pointed specifically to Wheatley’s work in Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a...

Every organization wants extraordinary results.  That’s what The Leadership Challenge: How to Make Extraordinary Things Happen in Organizations promises.  Built on decades of research, the book lays out a framework for what James Kouzes and Barry Pos...

Leadership is a tricky word to define. That’s why, in Leadership for the Twenty-First Century , Joseph Rost takes more than two-thirds of the book to try to define it – and probably still doesn’t get it quite right. You might expect that I wouldn’t be a fan...

There’s an old I Love Lucy  episode where Lucy and Edith are workers at a chocolate factory, and they can’t keep up, so they start eating the chocolates and stuffing them in their clothes. Laverne and Shirley  are standing in front of an assembly line in...

Sometimes, paths cross a few times before connections are made.  The Leadership of Organizational Change wasn’t my first interaction with Mark Hughes.  I read it because of the respect I had for a man who has spent his life trying to understand and...

Never has the relationship between leadership and change been so laid bare as in Leadership on the Line: Staying Alive Through the Dangers of Change . It should not be surprising that leadership and change are so related. Leaders are the catalysts and...

As a consultant for the better part of my career, I have had the opportunity to move between organizations fairly fluidly. I’ll be working with a manager for a few months or a few years and then move to the next project at the next organization. One o...

Sometimes my reading list has me walking down a long hall with statues lining each side. The statues are the great men and women who moved forward our understanding of ourselves, the way that we work, and the way that we lead. On Becoming a Leader is...

It was the closest that the world had ever come to a global nuclear war, and it started in America’s back yard. Metaphorically speaking, it was just one minute from the end of the atomic day. The clock advanced to just one minute before midnight, a w...

There are numerous books about leadership. A plethora of visionaries over the years have sought to improve leadership in organizations. So what makes Primal Leadership  unique is that it talks about the emotional component of leadership. Speaking about e...

There are a lot of noisy leaders in our world today. There are too few people who have the courage and desire to demonstrate Quiet Leadership . The book is interesting, because, ostensibly, it's introducing you to a six-step process for transforming...

Terri and I give a talk on conflict de-escalation and resolution with great regularity. One part of that talk is about the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) and specifically the introversion-extroversion scale. I – from the front of the room – ask the...

Have you ever had that bewildering moment when you’re in a conversation and you suddenly realize that you have no idea what the conversation is about? You’re going along, disagreeing but still conversing, until you reach the moment when you’re aware that ...

I meet monthly with a group of organizational development folks. Some of them are professors. Some are consultants. Others are practitioners in their organizations. I love the meetings because they challenge me to learn and grow. Several of the participants...

Being the president of your own company has its advantages. However, it doesn’t mean that you always get your way or that you’ve always got the power to tell others what to do. There are committees, boards, and other places where you’re not in charge. In my...

Margaret Wheatley’s work was a recommendation from a friend.  In a chance part of our conversations, he shared his reverence for her and her work.  That’s why I picked up Who Do We Choose to Be?: Facing Reality, Claiming Leadership, and Restoring Sanit...

My first visit to Walt Disney World was when I was about eight or nine. I can’t remember my exact age but from the pictures and my memories I know that I wasn’t too much older than that. I can remember arriving when the park opened and leaving when the...

Running your own company is sometimes challenging – in truth most entrepreneurs would say that it’s almost always challenging. In some ways I feel like the challenges of a small business are very different than the challenges of large organizations. Som...

I had read Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap … And Others Don’t  by Jim Collins years ago but I decided to re-read it because for whatever reason when I read it the last time, I didn’t have any memorable pull quotes – I didn’t have anythi...

It seems like we’re all prone to want to find amazing solutions. Whether it’s Ponce De Leon looking for the fountain of youth, searching for the lost city of Atlantis, or searching for El Dorado, we seek to find the seemingly impossible – and in at le...

These days it's relatively common to hear employees described as "human capital." However, that wasn't always the case. The term began to become popular in 1964 with the publishing of Human Capital , the work of Gary Becker. Before that, capital was...

With a title of Making It Happen  you might expect that the book is all about execution. How do you get the idea converted into action? At some level this is true, it’s about making ideas happen. However, at another level, it’s not. It’s less about e...

It started two years before The Great Depression, and the impact on what we know about management can't be understated. Management and the Worker seems to share the insights that were discovered at the Western Electric Company's Hawthorne Works based...

It started with the liars. They’d ask, “Do you have a minute?” They’d plop themselves down in the comfy guest chair and proceed to take about 45 minutes. That’s what kicked off Cy Wakeman’s quest and led to No Ego: How Leaders Can Cut the Cost of Work...

No one cares what you know until they know how much you care. That truth is at the heart of Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity . Your job as a manager or leader is to bring out the best in the people you’re working with, an...

While speaking with a friend recently she said that she had written in her notebook a concept similar to Snapchat  that she had never followed up on. I once knew someone who said that her father had invented the technology behind invisible fencing but n...

Lots of people speak about the Toyota Production System or lean manufacturing, but few have taken the time to look at what the originator has to say about it. Taiichi Ohno's Workplace Management: Special 100th Birthday Edition is his writing about the...

In my work on knowledge management it’s become all too clear that labor costs are the costs that dominate most organizations’ budgets. Unless you’re in a particularly material cost intensive industry – such as manufacturing – most of your cost in an org...

The more things change, the more they stay the same. In 1980, Richard Hackman and Greg Oldham wrote Work Redesign , which explains how and when to redesign work. I picked the book up in no small part due to my respect for Richard Hackman and his work ...

I’ve worked out loud in my career by accident. I started with editing then writing books. I started writing articles (because they required less effort) and I’ve been speaking for years now. In many ways, my life has been what Working Out Loud: For a Be...

Douglas Hubbard certainly knows how to throw down a dare. His book, How to Measure Anything: Finding the Intangibles in Business  certainly is a superlative title. The promise is that you’ll be able to measure absolutely anything with the techniques lai...

People make predictions all the time. They predict that their team will win the Super Bowl, or they’ll win the lottery. These predictions are based on little more than hope. The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail- but Some Don’t  see...

In the first part of this review we spoke of how people make predictions all the time. The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail- but Some Don’t  has more to offer than some generic input on predictions, it has a path for us to walk abo...

Nearly everyone has fantasized about getting a winning lottery ticket, even if we don’t play the lottery. The number one desire for a time traveling machine may be to go into the future and get the list of lottery numbers, so we can come back and win. W...

Everyone has been held accountable for metrics that they didn’t own the results of. Whether it was sales, profitability, or some other metric, we’ve been subject to The Tyranny of Metrics . That does not necessarily mean, however, that all metrics are ...

I heard Patrick Lencioni  speak at the Willow Creek Global Leadership Summit  and that prompted me to pick up his latest book, The Advantage: Why Organizational Health Trumps Everything Else in Business . I’ve been a fan of Lencioni’s work for a while....

It’s the spark that ignites a fire. It’s that initial fragment of an idea that finds other fragments and eventually assembles itself like a jigsaw puzzle into the next big thing. Each component of the core offering comes together bit by bit and piece by ...

As I mentioned in my review of Dialogue Mapping , my friend Paul Culmsee  and I met many years ago and continue to speak despite the 12 hour time difference between us. Last year Paul and Kailash Awati  (whom I’ve never had the pleasure of meeting) coauth...

Years ago I came to understand how learning worked in the trades model. The apprentice was – literally – following the instructions of a journeyman or master to complete small repeatable tasks. The journeyman would start to detach from the small repeatable tas...

The first quote from the book in my notes is, “Anyone who has spent time in an organization knows that dysfunctional behavior abounds. Conflict is frequently avoided or pushed underground rather than dealt with openly.” This is the heart of why I kne...

I’ve been a consultant for 25 years or so. In that time, I’ve seen some truly stellar organizations, a lot of so-so organizations, and a few that are seriously dysfunctional. When I was prompted in a session to take a look at the book Reinventing Orga...

What makes some organizations grow and thrive and others wither and die? That's just part of the question that Edith Penrose set out to answer in Theory of the Growth of the Firm . Her book was initially published in 1959 and was reprinted after her...