Mary and I walked out of our General Manager’s office and went to have coffee. We had just left one of those meetings when you know that your work life will never be quite the same. We had been given a huge challenge, and the stakes were very high. We were to complete and […]
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 remember unboxing it. One of my colleagues had ordered a benchtop milling machine for our engineering lab by convincing our team leader that it would help us avoid costly schedule delays by allowing us to make minor tweaks to prototype parts in the design work we were doing. I recall my thoughts toggling […]
I was early in my career serving as a design engineering manager for an industrial electronics firm. We were working on a new product release that called for a major change to a key component in the product. To accomplish this, we needed a globally compatible, high-wattage power supply that was lightweight (which meant we […]
The books have already been printed, the HBR article is in queue and the launch programs have been carefully orchestrated. Soon you’ll hear the authors on the most popular podcasts and see blurbs in both Inc. and Forbes Magazine. Then we’ll all be off and running. This river of new business tools and techniques takes […]
Many of you are enjoying a few slower, more laid back days in the office as the year wraps up. Like many of you, I too welcome these days and look forward to taking some time to regroup, process and develop a vision for the upcoming calendar year. It’s in this spirit that I’d like […]
This is the time of year when many groups have locked in their plans for next year and are getting ready for the welcome holiday break. Many of those plans are based on great ideas that have been harvested through the year from client and partner trips, conferences, books and speakers. Instead of contributing to […]
I’ve had the chance to do a lot of work with HR leaders and their firms recently in strategic implementation. One of the most frequently asked questions is this: what is our role in helping to drive new growth in the firm? Implied in the question is the idea that they are passengers on […]
I struck up a conversation at a conference last month with a C-level staff leader in a publicly-traded firm that has come under some real pressure for being conservative in its approach to growth. We were able to carve out a few quiet minutes so that she could pick my brain on decision-making processes I […]
It came out of nowhere: it was a request that one of our customer service people might have easily dismissed, yet for some reason it was put on my desk. The device being requested was significantly more stringent than the ones we had been building at the time, and while we received many of these […]
