You Can't Discipline Your Way Out of Drift. You Have to Trick Your Way In. Most executives think the problem with their program is a willpower problem. Enforce the process. Mandate the reporting standard. Hold people accountable in the steering meeting. Eventually,...
Happy Independence. Now Question It. Happy Independence — to those who are actually free and sovereign. Living in a free country does not mean you are free. We may be free from outsiders. Their influence may not be. That's not a slogan. It's worth sitting with,...
Success Success attracts people. Failure repels them. That's the illusion we carry — that people are drawn to us, or pull away from us. They are not. There is nothing about us that changes from Tuesday to Wednesday. What changes is our success and our failure. Our...
People Do not Resist Change. They Defend What They Already Have. People rarely resist change outright. What they resist is losing something they've already formed a bond with — a process they understand, a spreadsheet they built, a way of working they no longer have...
The Cost of Saving You love to save. Every sponsor does — it's part of the job, and it looks good in the minutes. But most sponsors can't actually tell you what a saving cost them. They know the number they kept. They don't know the number they gave up. Here's the...
Method to Madness Everything we do has a method attached to it. We rarely notice it, because most of the time the method is invisible — it's just "how things are done." But the method is doing all the work. It's the difference between success and failure, between...
Why It's So Hard to Start With the End in Mind? Everyone has heard the advice. Start with the end in mind. Picture where you want to land, then work backward. It sounds obvious once someone says it out loud — and almost nobody actually does it. I don't think that's a...
The Handoff Nobody Budgeted For You signed off on the business case. The project team delivered on time. Go-live happened, the vendor did a lap of honour, and everyone moved on to the next priority. Eighteen months later, you find out the rostering system nobody...