“Culture eats strategy for breakfast.”
– Peter Drucker
You might have the perfect plan, but without mutual trust, teamwork, and a clear sense of “this is who we are,” your chances of accomplishing it are pretty slim. On this page, look for posts that tell you how to build a positive, resilient team that magnifies the abilities of its individual members.
Give people more money and they will perform better right? Actually, no. Daniel Pink’s book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, throws cold water in the face of standard management thinking. In fact, he lists seven reasons why the reward/punishment model is a bad idea if you are trying to …
Book Notes: Drive – The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us Read More »
You are a member of a small group of survivors that has just crash-landed a float plane in remote sub-arctic Canada. You have been able to salvage 15 items from the plane, but you can’t take all of them with you. So as a group, you must rank order the …
Captain Ahab is famous in modern fiction for his maniacal pursuit of the Great White Whale, Moby-Dick. He gets a lot of bad press for his poor leadership style, and things didn’t end up going very well for most of the crew by the end of the book. But there …
Span of Control: The Leadership Secret of Captain Ahab Read More »
Trying to get off the ground with a new team? Looking for a way to get some bonding going sooner rather than later? Want to make it fun? Developing a sense of team within your group is critical to do early on. If you dive right into a project without …
The book title caught my eye because it’s something the Army has been doing for a long time. One evening, while observing Marines eating dinner in the field, author Simon Sinek noticed that as a matter of routine, the most junior Marines ate first. The highest ranking ones, the leaders, …
Recently while researching leadership topics, I came upon an interesting video on YouTube. In it, author L. David Marquet, a retired U.S. Navy Captain, relates how he turned the Navy’s conventional leadership paradigm on its head, and in doing so ended up not only becoming a better leader himself, but leaving a …
It was frosted toaster pastries and sugar-coated sugar bomb cereal for breakfast. Again. We have to do better. We were camping with the Scout troop, and while the outing was a lot of fun, the meals had become pretty uninspiring. Everyone knew we could do better, but the enthusiasm just …
Motivating with a Kitchen Utensil: The Golden Spatula Read More »
How to Measure the Unmeasurable “OK,” I said, “I agree it’s a good idea to try to have fun at our weekly meetings, but how do you make a concise goal out of that? How do you know when you have achieved fun?” Read on, and we’ll look at two …