Tag: management

How to Manage Up

Everyone has a boss. Even a CEO needs to manage their board or important customers. Knowing how to manage leaders in your organization or your client’s is a pretty important skill and one I did not come by naturally.  I’ve been luckily enough to have people knock sense into me. Know how your boss works  […]

Getting things done Part 2: Accept the weird and irrational

If you think saying something smart is all you need to make your idea a reality, you will have a career filled with disappointment and frustration. You need help, money, permission and support and getting it isn’t easy. In Part 1 of Getting Things Done I introduced a framework for driving change when all you […]

Getting things done Part 1: When you don’t have authority

I’ve spent my career trying to get things done or change things with no authority, no budget and no reports. Sometimes you have to make it work when all you have is charm, determination, persuasiveness and wit. Many mentors, managers and friends have helped me develop this framework. I’ve tried to pay that forward by […]

Pre-Mortems are great for kickoffs

The first few weeks of any product development effort are tricky. You are trying to figure out what you’re doing and how to work together. The expectations are always high and the timeline short. Recently I discovered the premortem in the excellent book Scaling Up Excellence: Getting to More Without Settling for Less by Robert Sutton and […]

Want to drive change internally? Here are two reasons you shouldn’t skip the interviews

I’ve spent most of my career being a troublemaker trying to push an organization into trying new things. Sometimes I’ve failed miserably and a few times I’ve succeeded. As an outside consultant I always start by taking to different groups to understand their perspective on the problem and it helps me understand the points of […]