One conversation at a time

January 29, 2024 in Success in business | Tags: , , , | Leave a comment

Your relationships are built on single acts. Your organization’s culture is one conversation at a time.

It’s about the cumulative effect of many comments and actions. Each on its own may not feel that important by itself, but impressions are made by the totality.

That said, we all remember actions and discussions which had an immediate and lasting impact. I remember the time I told my boss that I would rather quit my job than do what he was requesting. That was nearly thirty years ago.

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Organizational resilience

January 22, 2024 in Success in business | Tags: , , , | Leave a comment

It seems like a lot of my thoughts this month are gravitating towards flexibility and resilience! This week I’d like to explore what it means for a whole organization to withstand the buffets of change.

Even thrive.

Last week I talked about core principles of perspective, readiness, energy, learning, and trust. Well, it turns out that groups of people exercise these characteristics as well.

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No more normal

January 15, 2024 in Success in business | Tags: , , , | Leave a comment

Last week I talked about three views of resilience. But that opens up the very uncomfortable question of whether “normal” even exists.

It’s easy to get depressed about all the chaos and uncertainty which seems to surround us. I feel that way myself sometimes.

But then I realize that it’s just requiring me to develop a new set of skills. And even though I’ve never been a surfer, I like to think of it as “surfing through the changes.” I like the image because, to me, waves seem very unpredictable and abounding in chaos.

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Resilience

January 8, 2024 in Success in business | Tags: , , , | Leave a comment

There are a couple of ways to think about resilience.

The one we usually want to fall into is “rebounding back to normal.” After all, “normal” is the comfort zone and usually is our happy place.

The other way is to define resilience as “adapting to a new normal.” In this case, we have to admit that the world moves on, and the old normal may never exist again. Or parts of it might need to change.

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Looking forward

January 1, 2024 in Success in business | Tags: , , , | Leave a comment

I hate to tell you this, but I don’t think 2024 is going to be perfect.

We’re supposed to be all optimistic for the new year, right? And here I am with that crushing news.

As always, the challenge for us is to stay positive and forward-looking, despite the fact that things won’t align according to plan. They rarely do.

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Holiday time!

December 25, 2023 in Success in business | Leave a comment

No, I’m not working today. I wrote this earlier in December.

But I wanted to wish you all a very happy Christmas, or whatever holiday you might be celebrating this time of year. Isn’t it wonderful that we have this kind of variety?

I wish everyone peace and happiness as we move toward 2024.

Joy

December 18, 2023 in Success in business | Tags: , , , | Leave a comment

Are you ever happy in your job?

I’m often shocked by the number of people who are hating their work every day, slogging through the grind. As a leader, wouldn’t you like to do better than that for your people?

Are our lives really just about surviving?

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Hockey-stick growth

December 11, 2023 in Success in business | Tags: , , , | 1 comment

If you’ve done initiatives in business, you’re very familiar with this graph:

Often referred to as a “hockey stick growth chart”, it indicates how revenue will shift from investment mode (on the left) to wonderful growth (on the right). The problem is that this is always used to project the future, not the past. What actually happens is far messier and doesn’t follow a nice pretty growth curve.

This came to mind when I heard recent reports about why WeWork went bankrupt. Since I’ve fallen into this projected-growth trap myself, I thought it might be good to explore how we might do something different.

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Activity

December 4, 2023 in Success in business | Tags: , , , | Leave a comment

I don’t know about you, but most of the things I do I’m … barely competent at.

Not incompetent, mind you, but enough to get by. There are a few things that I’ve gotten quite good at, and during my life may have even excelled at something.

So I was heartened today by seeing a thoughtful quote that:

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Resentment grows

November 27, 2023 in Success in business | Tags: , , , | 2 comments

We all learn to hold back negative feelings, because it helps us to mature from childhood.

The negative side of this, though, is that those feelings (which can stem from misunderstandings, mistakes, and disagreements) can then grow until they emerge to cause real damage.

They can explode into arguments and destroy relationships. So how do we deal with this in the workplace?

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