There Is No Greatness in Serving Your Own For the people we care about, we give our resources and ourselves. We think about them when they're not in the room. We plan for them. We set aside what we've built so they can pressure-test it, prosper from it, evolve past...
You Cannot Be Told to Be Authentic A general manager I worked alongside used to open steering committee meetings by asking the hard question first. "Before we start, what are we not saying in this room?" It made people uncomfortable. It also made the program better,...
The Cost of Not Knowing What You Need I keep a small note to myself: the cost of not knowing what you need. Most of what I want to write about today sits underneath that one line. Go-live is not the goal. Every ERP program I've been near treats the go-live date like...
The Economy Runs on Our Pain. That's Not an Accident. A customer carries pain, pleasure, desire, need. A supplier sits in the middle. An employee — who is also, somewhere else in their life, a customer — carries the same four things. Currency moves from customer to...
Knowing Is Not Learning. Learning Is Not Implementing. Your team already knows what to do. They've read the book, sat through the training, heard the talk. Yet the same mistakes keep happening. That's not an information problem — it's a gap between three different...
Staying Lean Is Not Free Many businesses try to stay lean. It's good business philosophy, repeated so often it's stopped being examined. But "lean" is not one decision. It's a label we put on four or five different decisions, and we rarely stop to ask which one we're...
Why We Feel Stuck? We feel stuck for many reasons. But one of the most common is also the least examined: we are stuck with the wrong people. Not incompetent people. Not badly intentioned people. Wrong people — the wrong function, standing in for a role your program...
Keep Your Scars Safe: What Failed Projects Are Trying to Teach You Every project that goes wrong leaves a mark. A blown deadline. A budget that quietly doubled. A team that burned out and quit right after launch. These are scars — emotional, financial, and operational...