This month, I had a chance to attend the Water Summit in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The purpose of the conference is to draw out the leaders from government, industry and academia to build a foundation of dialogue around an issue that is hard to find actionable agreement on: the availability of abundant, clean water for the […]
Have you had the feeling? You are at a great conference and have found yourself in the zone. The speakers are doing a great job of landing concept after concept and your notebook is bursting with insights and actions. You may even put some open circles behind those items so you can cross them off […]
Growth Leaders need to be the “meaning makers” in our firms – and the current best method of doing this is to create a narrative. Growth Leaders catalyze action by creating lucid pictures of the future in their organizations by stepping into complexity and creating clarity. They paint on three canvases: the now, the near […]
It’s a constant cycle in sports. After the completion of the championship cycle, there is a draft. Rookie players are chosen, then free agents (experienced players) are bid on and a preliminary roster is set. It’s then that the war games begin. Each team tries to outguess each other’s strategy by looking at who has […]
We have an interesting case study playing out right now: Ford Motor Company has had three recent waves of leadership changes that give evidence to the demands of leading a large mature firm into what has become a classic set of trade offs between optimizing the current business model and creating the next. For those […]
I was leading a workshop last month, and we reached the point where we were working on the participants’ projects. We were working in the STRIDE framework and sharing how to build a high-integrity project that makes the risk-taking transparent to both the team and management. This is always a big moment in the workshop, […]
The view was amazing. The conference room was on the top floor overlooking the corporate campus – you could see for miles. It was here that I, along with two subject matter experts, were set to meet with the global P&L owner of the largest and most mature business in their multi-billion dollar portfolio. As […]
We had an amazing product change: it was truly lightning in a bottle. The group I was leading had discovered an unserved need through some deep customer problem solving that we had been called in to help with. We had enough discretionary time to get the basic work done and to do some limited […]
I was on the phone recently with a colleague who leads a significant development organization in a Fortune 100 firm. She was lamenting the need for more people to take the lead on helping to craft more insightful and on-target services. It’s something I hear from many of my client firms, and when we go […]
The speeches were done, we enjoyed cake and coffee and finished passing out the checks. The hardware was on the table (a CEO award). But more importantly, we had sliced almost half of the time it took us to do custom product development, which was pushing up customer satisfaction and would lock us into designs […]
