Posts filed as “Effectiveness”

The Flying Handshake

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I met a guy named Marcus who was based in Germany and ran an IT services group, which was based in Silicon Valley. Several times a year Marcus would fly to California to spend time with his team, chatting, having meals, talking about work, but also interacting on a human and personal level. He calls…

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The Wobegon Effect

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80% of CEOs think their company makes a killer product. 8% of their customers agree. Your awesomeness is good. But humility will help….

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What it really takes

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Imagine a race in which you don’t know what you will have to do, where or how long the course is, or even when it will end. Imagine that once you sign up for this race, you are immediately told, repeatedly, to quit before you even start. You are warned you might die, and even…

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Incentivize Innovation that Escalates Me to We

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We do this constantly in our work: we figure out macros and hacks that streamline and accelerate our work. A routine we might perform numerous times a day, becomes a habit we learn how to tweak and accelerate and perform faster to increase our own performance. But what if our organizational cultures incentivized people to…

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Mindset Exercise: Resources vs. Resourcefulness

[one_half]Think of a failed project or effort in your life, choose below and finish this sentence: “I can’t do that because I don’t have the ____________” Time Money Technology Contacts Experience Management Support [/one_half] [one_half_last] Now think of a successful effort, choose below and finish this sentence: “We pulled off a great success because we…

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The Velocity of Learning

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You don’t often think of learning as having a speed, a velocity, but it does. The classic notion of practice involves putting in the hours, doing the time, right? But there is a striking difference in the quality of practice that leads to accelerated learning. And it isn’t about watching the clock, it’s more about…

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Your product is not what you sell, it’s the difference you make

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Your product is the impact you make, the change you affect, the experience your product delivers. Your product is the result, the causatum, the punch. Sell cars? No, you don’t sell a car, you sell utility or transport or identity or experience or speed perhaps. In pharma? – you don’t sell drugs, you sell health…

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Lessons from Challenger, Build Hope and Be Accountable

“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” – Dr. Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Richard Feynman, renowned physicist, was asked in 1986 to help understand what happened in the Challenger disaster. He not only gave a famous testimony to Congress describing the O-ring failure that led to the…

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Hit a Wall? Your Mindset Matters

[facebook] “Borders? I have never seen one. But I have heard they exist in the minds of some people.” – Thor Heyerdahl, innovator, adventurer, and border-smasher I have a friend who installed the same invisible dog fence I did, but he admitted he didn’t bother with the training and simply installed the underground wire and…

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Turn Anxiety into Positive Action

[facebook] In the always-on bottle rocket economy, in which creative contributors spend their extended waking hours in simultaneous and schizophrenic bouts of digital grazing, conference calls, work tasks, social media…it’s no surprise anxieties and hypertension have overtaken the workforce. I had an interview the other day with Chip Conley, Founder and CEO of Joie de…

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