Steve Norrie points us to LeGuin’s Law from Jerry Weinberg’s More Secrets of Consulting. It’s a great quote from Ursula LeGuin’s The Left Hand of Darkness: “When action grows unprofitable, gather information. When information grows...
A friend of mine is learning to ask for help. He’s a smart guy. He’s been successful in the corporate world, and before that he was successful in school.And that might be part of his difficulty. We are taught that asking for help is a *bad thing.* Asking...
The other day I was talking to a friend who is trying to accomplish the work he used to do with a staff of three with just himself and one other (junior) person. “We’re all stretched so thin that if one person takes a day of vacation, it’s a...
Brian Marick posts this note he wrote asking for friendliness and civility in a mailing list debate.I’m with Brian. Debate is an argument between opposing points of views. Debaters support their own position and focus on weaknesses in the other position. People...
Awhile back, I attended a workshop where a recently promoted manager, Renee, complained about being overwhelmed by volume of work she had to accomplish. She had recently added two people to her staff, but she was still overwhelmed. The other people in the workshops...
Alan Francis posts this piece on compromise from Seth Godin’s book “Purple Cow: Transform Your Business by Being Remarkable”: The old saying is right: “A camel is a horse designed by committee.” If the goal of marketing is to be extreme...
A recent HBR article asks Are You Supporting Your B Players?It’s a good question. Many managers focus exclusively on the low-performers, believing that their job is to bring them up to adequate performance. It’s a huge investment in time and emotion (as...
Brian Marick reports on his blog that he’s ducking out on a trip to the water park to attend ScrumMaster training. Here’s how he explains the difference between a conventional project manager and a ScrumMaster:What’s a ScrumMaster? The closest...
On her Hiring Technical People blog, Johanna Rothman writes about firing people who don’t work.This matches my experience. Holding on to employees who aren’t pulling their weight drags down morale for the entire team. Firing someone isn’t easy, and...
I often work with groups who know where they want to go, have some good ideas on how to get there, but they are blocked. When I ask why they can’t achieve the results they envision, they tell me things like: –We lack resources.–We lack...
fa-cil-i-tate. verb. (1) to make easier or less difficult; to help forward (an action, a process, etc.). (2) to assist the progress of (a person).–Random House College Dictionary Revised EditionI spent Friday, Saturday and Sunday in Ottawa at the annual IAF...
Laurent Bossavit posts a discussion of the reasons to deep six the status meeting. The problem ? A status meeting’s traditional format has the person who convened the meeting, a manager usually, work through a list of items. They are items of importance to the...
All retrospectives, all the time. At least in this post.Keith Ray posts this snippet about self-directed improvement paths on his blog. (See previous post on Keith’s Project Management tip on Reforming Project Management.)Retrospectives are an excellent vehicle...
My pal Keith Ray sent this Project Management tip into Hal Macomber: 007: Create A Habit of Self-Directed Improvement Keith Ray reminds us that an intention and routine of improvement matters more than any specific improvement methods. Too often a bureaucratic intent...
From an article by Tom Krattenmaker in HBS Working Knowledge: Career Effectiveness: In Search of the Perfect Meeting: “The biggest complaints I hear about meetings are that they’re unproductive, that they last too long, that they’re...
One-on-one meetings are a vastly underrated management technique… well done one-on-one meetings, that is. I find them useful particularly when the group I’m managing is a group, not a tight-knit team, but I’ve used them when I was managing project...
This from Keith Ray, after reading Selling the Invisible by Harry Beckwith: “Management” is mostly invisible – the worse management is, the more visible it is. The best managers (I’m told) often seem like they are neither busy nor doing...
Laurent Bossavit tells a story about following “the process” to fix a customer problem. The only problem is, at the end of it all, the customer still has a problem.Laurent writes:My version of the Zeroth Law of Quality: if you’re not solving the...
Brian Marick has a pointer to this piece on Martin Fowler’s bliki: MF Bliki: WhatIsFailure The Standish Group’s CHAOS report has been talking of billions of wasted dollars on IT projects for many years. The 34% success rate is actually a improvement over...
Johanna Rothman has this to say in the latest issue of her ezine “Pragmatic Manager:” Meetings are a fact of our lives. Most of the time we don’t need a facilitator to help move our meeting along; we can manage to accomplish the goals of the meeting...
