thinking/critical

Fight or flight syndrome leaves out an important – and destructive – third reaction. Freeze. Are you doing the business equivalent of the suicidal bunny routine?

People avoid leadership responsibility for many different reasons. Perhaps the most powerful reason is that true leadership involves the most humbling personal sacrifice.

The good work of evaluating comparative risk can be undermined by basic human frailty. Today’s article takes another look at the challenge of choosing.

Much of the criticism leveled at today’s business leaders is called for, but there is one aspect of leadership responsibility that is poorly understood. Leaders are compensated for making decisions – frequently very difficult decisions with no clear right answer. Today’s blog explores this idea.

The changes you choose to make now will have tremendous impact on the success you can expect in the future. Too many companies are cutting loose important (strategic) talent, eliminating their advertising budgets, changing their marketing strategies, and reducing their operations to customer-unfriendly shells in fear-fueled efforts to survive.

A depressed economy takes existing conditions and magnifies them. It’s like stop-action photography. The bad business decisions we make that would normally unfold over years, instead unravel in a year, a quarter, or even a month. This is how we explain some organizations in every industry thriving while their competitors contract and fail.

For those of us who are or aspire to be leaders, the choice must be about more than the increased paycheck. The choice must be about having a passion to lead, a belief that you can make a positive difference, and a willingness to be criticized, disliked, and argued with for the sake of progress.

Most western education trains us to look back on a scheduled basis and evaluate how we have done so far. This process is healthy for assessing past work, but is practically useless for ensuring ongoing improvement.
 
It would be better if we had each child tape their current report card to the front of their desk [...]

If you find yourself assembling virtual teams of home-based contract workers, you will need to develop new skills and sensitivities to motivate, manage, and assess them.

Though cost-based accounting methods can be credited with advancing organizational ability to dissect operating processes and analyze where change might be most beneficial, cost accounting also has a downside. The very process of apportioning costs applies component-based to thinking to system-wide problems. Does this mean that cost allocations are bad and should not be done? Definitely not! (though I have discovered that this topic has a strange knack for bringing out the argumentative extremist in far too many businessmen). The solution is to recognize that component-based thinking creates a certain type of bias, and that bias can be offset by approaching the same problem (or, ideally, set of problems) with system-based thinking. Here’s an example of an actual problem