Deloitte, the consulting, risk management and financial services firm, has tackled two current issues in two recent reports: the business next wave of globalization, and how business executives can best demonstrate that their enterprises are creating value for their shareholders. Let’s start with, the 134-page Business Trends 2014: Navigating the wave of globalization. This is […]
Give the Good Idea All the Time Needed
Steven Johnson, in his book Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation, talks about great ideas such as the pencil, the printing press, Google and the flush toilet and wonders how flashes of innovative brilliance originate. Yes, there’s the proverbial light bulb moment of pure genius, but Johnson is more concerned about […]
Avoid the Good Idea Graveyard
The Good Idea Graveyard is that sad place where all those good ideas go that somehow seem to get lost in the shuffle, not prioritized, or were never really understood in the first place. Dr. Marla Gottschalk, an industrial/organizational psychologist, in a recent LinkedIn article Where Did Those Great Ideas Go?, reminded me of my […]
Email Ping Pong
I attend many conferences speaking on the Vested Way and teaching the virtues of the Vested methodology. A good thing about conferences is they bring people together with new and fresh perspectives. Last week I spoke at the Warehouse Education Research Council’s annual conference and the morning kickoff speaker was Chris Helder, a 44 year […]
What Game are You Playing?
Marketing guru Seth Godin has a short blog, “The short game, the long game and the infinite game” in which he asks, “How long is your long run?” He continues that a short game is when people or organizations see the lens through a short ROI and “measure the world in ten second flashes, and […]
McDonald’s Honors Suppliers for Sustainability Innovations
By now I’m sure you know how much I appreciate McDonald’s collaborative “System First” business model—I devoted an entire chapter to its “three-legged” relationship approach to employees, franchise owner/operators and suppliers in Vested: How P&G, McDonalds and Microsoft are Redefining Winning in Business Relationships. The company’s deeply-engrained culture for long-term, win-win relationships with suppliers dates […]
Another Side of the Elephant
Recently I’ve been on a kick to make sure that companies do not ignore the elephant in the room and to make sure the elephant gets out. There’s a corollary to those two posts for me that was prompted with the news this week that Popes John Paul II and John XXIII were canonized as […]
Let that Elephant Out!
Last time I talked about Susan Scott’s Fierce Conversations and the transformative power of words on relationships. As I continued my reading I came across a host of juicy insights but one section made me think about the fierce or necessary conversations that can and should take place, but don’t. Why? You guessed it—because the elephant is in the […]
Don’t Talk To, Talk With
I’ve been reading Susan Scott’s Fierce Conversations, which I find is a practical, insightful and life-affirming guide for achieving success in life and work—“one conversation at a time.” I feel a certain kinship with Scott, though I don’t know her personally. For one thing she was raised in Tennessee and now lives in Seattle. She […]
Navigate the Priceberg
In an article this month for Material Handling & Logistics Magazine, I reiterated a point I frequently make, that is, outsourcing and off-shoring are not interchangeable terms and the decision to outsource does not automatically mean that jobs are lost to another country. In the article, “Don’t Re-Shore the Priceberg” I note that the decision […]
