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...
Why Change Is Difficult: A Field Guide for Executives Every executive says they want change. Fewer recognize the exact moment they're blocking it. Change doesn't usually fail because people are lazy or resistant on principle — it fails because of a small set of...
Go-Live Is Not a Finish Line Somewhere in every technology program, a date gets written down early, put on a slide, and repeated so many times that it stops being a plan and becomes an identity. Go-live. Everyone starts measuring themselves against it. Nobody...
Why is your project not finishing on time? Every executive who's sponsored a major project knows the moment. The steering committee pack has been green for three months. Then, somewhere around month four, the date quietly moves. Then it moves again. By the time the...
You Cannot Change the Fruit Without Changing the Seed Every situation you face — a market shift, a difficult report, a resignation letter on your desk — is just raw data. What turns that data into a decision is a pattern: the lens you use to interpret what your...