Improvement Cost?
I was talking to a couple of people last week about the situation in their organization. To cut a long story short, suffice it to say that there were plenty of symptoms of trouble, and management had settled in on the expectation that it was going to cost millions of dollars to clean things up. Once I got up from the floor, we talked about why I believe that an attitude like that will almost surely lead to disappointment. Read more
Training for Value
It would be naive to suggest that I don’t generate a good percentage of revenue from training engagements. Unfortunately, it would also be naive to suggest that these engagements consistently provide the most value for my clients. In fact, the opposite is true in many cases. Not because the training provided is bad (as there is plenty of objective evidence to the contrary), but because most organizations bring in training for the wrong reasons. Read more
Art and Science
The March 2009 Edition of Harvard Business Review has an excellent article entitled ‘When Should a Process be Art, Not Science?’ Many great insights, but as with most things that we try to categorize, there is primarily a sense in the article that we need to choose, that the answer be one or the other: art or science. Relegated to a sidebar is the notion that science can be a platform for art, which I see as the primary insight in the article. This is something that anyone that works in that ‘process’ niche should think deeply about, even if you are like me and prefer to not utter that ‘p-word’ too loudly. Read more
Learning Via Others
One thing I have noticed in the past few years is that there seems to be an explosion of coaches in the market, similar to the explosion of entrepreneurs and consultants that occurs when the economy sours, and people are driven to tackle a new venture. As with any major influx of resources into a crowded market, you will likely find some good coaches and some that, well, are less than stellar. Find a good one though, as I did recently, and you can learn quite a lot. Read more
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