Career Management
« Previous EntriesDeparture tales
Monday, August 23rd, 2010This is a tale of three departures and their lessons for IT leaders.
Departure #1 is Steven Slater. In case you’ve been living in a cave, Slater, a JetBlue flight attendant, experienced an intense customer relationship opportunity with a passenger who retrieved her luggage before the plane reached the gate.
That’s when Slater achieved greatness:
A good leadership lesson from very bad leadership
Monday, June 21st, 2010BP’s new strategy: Tony Hayward isn’t gone, but they’re hoping he will be forgotten. Chairman of the board Carl-Henric Svanberg decided Hayward shouldn’t be turned into one of the small people just yet, because his primary sin was his impact on BP’s image.
Which tells me neither Hayward nor Svanberg has spent much time shopping at [...]
How to be the smartest person in the room
Monday, June 7th, 2010I’ve always wanted to be too smart for my own good. Regrettably, I usually have the opposite problem.
Especially when the subject is investing.
Correspondent Scott Winger suggests that as problems go, this isn’t much of one (the failing to be too smart for one’s own good part, that is, not the investing part). He and I [...]
The importance of being a person
Monday, March 22nd, 2010Margin is so often misunderstood.
People who should know better explain that companies selling products with low profit margins should pursue a different strategy, because “… a 5% profit margin isn’t doing very well for your shareholders.”
They’re confused. Don’t believe me?
Personal business strategy
Monday, March 15th, 2010Business strategies and tactics aren’t real strategies and tactics. They’re metaphorical strategies and tactics.
The terms “strategy” and “tactics” belong to military planners, who use them to decide on the actions … broad and specific, respectively … their forces pursue to defeat an enemy.
Many businesses pursue what they call strategies and employ what they’re pleased to [...]
Who’s a business and what isn’t
Monday, March 8th, 2010 If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a hundred times: IT generally shouldn’t run itself as a business that sells to its internal customers. It should, instead, act as an active, integral part of the organization, collaborating with everyone else to create value for Real Paying Customers.
Something else I’ve often recommend: Don’t think [...]
Someone Else’s Problem?
Monday, December 7th, 2009Bare Bones Project Management was supposed to be nothing more than a lightweight summary of standard project management practice. A few years and several hundred seminar participants later, it turns out that it is, in fact, more than that. Unlike traditional IT project management it asks project managers and project teams to take responsibility, not [...]
Leading without authority
Monday, November 16th, 2009What if the CEO had no authority?
Take it a step further: What if you had no authority either? Same job, same responsibilities. You gauge success the same way you gauge it today. The only difference is that you can’t exert your authority and make it stick.
How much would change? Very little, I hope. Those who [...]
Social Networking Dinosaur Syndrome
Monday, October 26th, 2009I just finished Leonard Susskind’s The Black Hole War: My Battle with Stephen Hawking to Make the World Safe for Quantum Mechanics. If you enjoy having your mind explode, you need to read it, because your mind will detonate at least three times while you do. Probably more.
The Black Hole War re-introduced me to grok [...]
Issue Management: What the methodologies leave out
Monday, October 19th, 2009Scientists call it the observer effect. It’s what happens when the act of observation affects what they’re observing. Werner Heisenberg used it to develop his uncertainty principle. It’s why medical researchers use double-blind treatment trials and placebo controls.
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Bob Lewis is president of 