Business Strategy

Unspoken Business Rules

December 17, 2009
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I was going to write about some recent consulting experiences, but remembered that I’ve already written about this. I think these rules may be timeless. Like viruses that have been on the earth since the beginning of time, these rules (and many others) have infected business since the industrial revolution. Here is a roundup of the 5 unspoken business rules:

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Fall / Winter 2009 Reading List

September 4, 2009
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Here is what I’ve been reading. I’ve finished some of these already but I’ll go ahead and list them…

NurtureShock by Po Bronson

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Executive Psychopaths

June 6, 2007

This is an excerpt of an article by Gardiner Morse in the Harvard Business Review. You may expect an article like this to appear only in psychology journals but it’s becoming clear that psychology is taking a prominent role in the workplace:

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Lousy Managers Are Next Outsourcing Trend

April 4, 2007

A classic from 2004: The move to outsource white-collar jobs is moving up the company hierarchy to the incompetent manager level. Many US companies are discovering they can find management talent abroad that is just as clueless as the homegrown variety. India has proven to be adept at producing managers who are skilled at not adding any value whatsoever.

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Asking the Stupid Questions

February 21, 2007
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I worked at McDonald’s when I was a sophomore in high school. I had to get up at like 4:30 every Saturday morning to work the breakfast shift. It was right next to a mall and was slammed every morning. There was this manager – he was the one that put together all of the orders – that would yell things out to rest of the employees to tell them what things to make. He would yell things like, “pull 11, pull 32, and run a b,d,c,d”. I never knew what he was talking about and figured someone must have understood this secret code.

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The Silly Simplicity of Future ECM

January 26, 2007
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My interest in ECM (enterprise content management) is purely based on the value it can deliver to the business. I think much progress has been made, but the focus is still very much on technology. I would start with your users and ask them what would make their lives easier – that would be my feature set. Some of the things business users often ask for seems impossible, but the basic theme I usually get is this: they want the system to handle the difficult, time consuming stuff and shift the complexity away from the human and put it onto the machine. To most users, this was the point of buying the system in the first place.

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Web Standards Circa 1995

December 22, 2004

I guess it’s true that things do come around again. If you’re as old as me, you may remember the very early days of the web. The web was built around individual webmasters with single HTML pages with massive amounts of information on an endless page that scrolled on forever. There was usually a long list of links on the side that linked to the author’s favorite websites. To go along with this was usually a cool background image. This was all done away with in favor of more compact and usable web designs. Or, was it?

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Disciplined As a Symphony

September 24, 2004

There is an excellent new article over at Knowledge@Wharton, Teamwork in a Shock Trauma Unit: New Lessons in Leadership. This is an lesson in what can happen when even one member of the team is out of sync.

I was at a symphony a few weeks ago and marveled at the precision and team work that goes into a symphony. I think that we’ll be seeing more and more articles like this observing leadership and team work dynamics outside of traditional business. For all of the books, journals, experts, and consultants that are out there business leadership and team work seem to be pretty poor compared to something as complex and disciplined as a symphony. It’s as if each individual playing becomes one mind while they are playing. It’s such a delicate balance that if even one individual is off by so much as a note or octave the whole theatre will notice it and for a moment be distracted from the beauty of it all. It reminds me of James Hillman’s book, We’ve Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy—And the World’s Getting Worse.

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