70% of change efforts fail, which leads to crumbled organizations, frustration and resentment. I once saw an ERP implementation contract worth hundreds of millions of dollars to the Systems Integrator…not have a budget for change and training. Several Project Change Requests later, there was the minimum required to get us to Go Live. Many enterprise…
Some interesting talk on money… After WWII, the United States represented almost half of the world’s GDP. More recently, the US was at 22%. There are more payday lender locations in the US than there are Starbucks and McDonald’s locations combined (Source: TheWire.com). Just 2% of app developers pull in more than half of all…
In a survey of 200,000, BCG found that employees look for: Appreciation for work Relationship with colleagues, Work/life balance, and Relationship with boss Number 8 was salary. To help address these employee desires, Bersin by Deloitte advocates for transforming “talent management” to “people management,” with a renewed focus on corporate culture, engagement, environment, leadership,…
I had lunch with an innovation expert in food – originally from Sweden, he has now worked for some of the top American brands of food. The 1981 US government food pyramid turned out to be all wrong, and there is increasing pressure of nutrition today, which includes putting cheap ingredients in food (i.e., pink…
I recently heard a financial services CEO speak. He mentioned three interesting leadership decisions that we can all learn from: “We’re currently at a point whereby the amount of capital that we have is probably in a much, much more healthy place than it’s ever been…So the issue is, what do we do with our…
Purpose drives performance. This is how leaders unleash the power and drive of their entire workforce, while focusing that combined effort in one aligned direction. With purpose, employees bring their “whole selves” to work with passion and commitment (Source: Korn Ferry). This also results in them tapping into “discretionary energy” (i.e., going the extra mile)…
I toured John Hopkins Sibley Memorial Hospital’s innovation center in Washington DC, and was amazed at what they are accomplishing with their human-centered design approach. Their projects included everything from helping moms interact with newborns in the NICU, to a story-telling approach to make MRI machines less scary for children, to how patients park at…
Amway’s business model is recruiting independent business operators to personally market the company’s health, nutrition, beauty and home-care products to consumers. In 1995, they expanded into China and rapidly grew to $200 million in 3 years. The government banned direct sales, as they were concerned about scams. Citing political unrest, they required physical stores –…
A famous Renaissance work was Machiavelli’s The Prince. Its thesis was “there is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success, than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things.” John P. Kotter agreed with this thesis in HBR’s What Leaders…
The Texas Military Department defines three environments to operate in: Internal, External, and Future. John Nash, highlighted in the 2001 film A Beautiful Mind, had a game theory focused on “dominant strategy.” This says that you must consider the industry landscape and your competitors’ behaviors. This Nash equilibrium says that your best guess of a…
