" We’re heading into a world characterized by big events, big forces, and massive storms. We’re going to be vulnerable little specks high on the mountain when the storm hits out of nowhere. And if we’re not prepared, we’re going to die up there. Or we’re going to be in real serious trouble. We need to understand what separates those who do well from those who don’t do well when the world spins completely out of our control. We just finished six years of what we call our turbulence research".
"We are now, I think, having to adjust to dealing with a world that is going to be ferocious. We don’t have any practice with that. What I’ve learned from the turbulence research has already started to affect my life. I’ve become a total paranoid, neurotic freak. It has shown me the importance of building in big shock absorbers".
Scroll down and/or click into this item to find the full list of companion links from the book,"Wheel$pin: Regaining Traction in a Fast Changing Business World by Maximizing Your Organizational Agility" organized in numerical order in which they appear in the book and by chapter/page number.Each link will take you to additional content, materials and resources as refereneced in the book. Scroll down and/or click into this item to see the full list. Enjoy.
Supplement your learning and application with online content, giving you pragmatic tips, techniques, and tools that will continue evolving over time. The book acts as a portal and keystone summary to this online content which will keep you up to date by referencing new events, stories, case-studies and ideas.
Also, in this first booklink, here are links to files containing all the graphics from the book, full-size and animated, for you to use any way you choose—perhaps to bring your team up to speed or put on your wall as reminders. Due to file size of the Power Point files, here are several componet files you can download:
What happened in that cockpit that day? Watch the video at the In the Driving Seat channel on YouTube
Recovering and listening to the cockpit voice recorder (CVR), the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) concluded in its final report that the cause of the crash was pilot error and specifically: "the failure of the flight crew to monitor flight instruments during the final four minutes of flight and to detect an unexpected descent soon enough to prevent impact with the ground. Preoccupation with a malfunction of the nose landing gear position indicating system distracted the crew’s attention from the instruments and allowed the descent to go unnoticed"
In his 1990 book, The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, Peter Senge explains the difference between detail complexity and dynamic complexity:
"The reason that sophisticated tools of forecasting and business analysis, as well as elegant strategic plans, usually fail to produce dramatic breakthroughs in managing a business—they are all designed to handle the sort of complexity in which there are many variables: detail complexity. But there are two types of complexity. The second type is dynamic complexity, situations where cause and effect are subtle and where the effects over time of interventions are not obvious. Conventional forecasting, planning and analysis methods are not equipped to deal with dynamic complexity. The real leverage in most management situations lies in understanding dynamic complexity not detail complexity."(The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization, Peter Senge, 1990).
In other fields of work that are acutely journey-oriented, the dynamic skills required are already highly developed, experientially and in the field, from which we can learn. Consider these scenarios:
Being a Vistage Chair is about helping our members interpret leading-edge thinking and experience from speakers and each other. It’s about helping them translate that into relevance and applicability in their particular business, in their particular situation, and with their particular needs and wants. It’s about facilitating their commitment and accountability for applying these ideas, sustaining them, and driving them through to results. It’s about “resulting.” Tapping into the power of a peer group process, we help them tackle all three dimensions of being In the Driving Seat, to be architects of their journey, creating traction in business and in life.
Being In the Driving Seat of organizational agility is complicated, and there is a lot to master. It is a long, rocky path, with no quick and easy payoffs and long stretches on the plateau. Dabblers, Obsessives, and Hackers hate the plateau (Dabbler, Obsessive, Hacker or Master?) whereas Masters learn to love the plateau, keep plodding along, and wage war against the barrage of the quick fix, fast temporary relief, bottom line, anti-mastery mentalities.
“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.” – Charles Darwin.
Darwin became intrigued by the diversity of species he saw all around the world, which were highly suited to their local environment and yet clearly had shared origins. He wondered what process could explain this, and eventually, in 1859, he published his Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection, explaining:
In his 2007 book, The Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative Thinking, Roger Martin puts it well:
“The leaders I have studied share at least one trait, aside from their talent for innovation and long-term business success. They have the predisposition and the capacity to hold two diametrically opposing ideas in their heads. And then, without panicking or simply settling for one alternative or the other, they’re able to produce a synthesis that is superior to either opposing idea. Integrative thinking is my term for this processor—more precisely, this discipline of consideration and synthesis—that is the hallmark of exceptional businesses and the people who run them.”
The airframe of a modern jet fighter plane (such as the F-22 or the F-35) is not designed with gliding in mind. Unlike other aircraft for which the airframe is structured for gliding, a modern jet fighter is designed to be implicitly unstable and in a state of disequilibrium. If you turn everything off, it crashes. Plain and simple. What keeps it in the air under normal circumstances? The fly-by-wire computers, keeping it stable by making micro-adjustments many times a second to cope with the disequilibrium.
In his 2005 book, "A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age", Daniel Pink explains:
“We are moving from an economy and a society built on the logical, linear, computer-like capabilities of the Information Age to an economy built on the inventive, empathetic, big-picture capabilities of what’s rising in its place, the Conceptual Age. Today, the defining skills of the previous era—the “left brain” capabilities that powered the Information Age—are necessary but no longer sufficient. The “right brain” qualities of inventiveness, empathy, joyfulness, and meaning increasing will determine who flourishes and who flounders. For individuals, families, and organizations, professional success and personal fulfillment now require a whole new mind"
In their 2007 book, "Managing the Unexpected: Resilient Performance in an Age of Uncertainty", Karl Weick and Kathleen Sutcliffe say:
“Unexpected events often audit our resilience. They affect how much we stretch without breaking and then how well we recover. Some of those audits are mild. But others are brutal. Unrecognized mild audits often turn brutal. High Reliability Organizations (HROs) practice a form of organizing that reduces the brutality of audits and speeds up the process of recovering".
See video playlist at the In the Driving Seat channel on YouTube, including video of a Police Driving Shool (London Metropolitan Police, UK), including footage of trainees giving a running commentary verbalizing their OODA Loop while in emergency response driving situations.
Journey-ionics is a conceptual model helping us understand journeys at a microscopic level and how we link and accumulate the "ions" of a journey as individual thoughts, questions, decisions and actions.
In his 2007 book, "The Future of Management", Gary Hamel relates pre-adaptation to business and our organizational agility challenge, putting it this way:
"Evolution occasionally equips organisms with apparently superfluous, reproductively neutral features that turn out, quite by accident, to be highly useful when conditions change. This is known as pre-adaptation. To be resilient, a company needs a lot of lightly scripted pre-adaptation—policies that give associates the chance to pre-adapt rather than react. Too much of what gets done in most companies is in response to some already pressing issue; there’s no slack, no space for improvisation, and no way to defend projects that aren’t immediately useful. That’s why so many companies end up on the wrong side of the change curve. Your job as a management innovator is to make sure that the management systems in your company encourage strategic pre-adaptation.”
We are progressively exploring the three dimensions of the void we need to fill, to be fully filling our role In the Driving Seat of our business and the agility we need as an organization. How we see is how we think is how we act. We are helping you see the three dimensions of the challenge as clearly as you need to.
In his book, "The Fifth Discipline", Peter Senge outlines the five disciplines of learning organizations, saying, “Today, I believe, five new ‘component technologies’ are gradually converging to innovate learning organizations. Systems thinking, mental models, personal mastery, shared vision, and team learning & dialogue are inescapable elements of building learning organizations.” We can map these five components into the Execution Excellence 2.0 model.
The Journey-Judgment Opportunity Assessment translates the 13 moving parts of the Journey-judgment model of Execution Excellence into 13 driving disciplines for reducing wheelspin, increasing traction, and brewing up a BREAKTHROUGH! with your organizational agility. It provides a template with which to judge where you are in your journey, evolving from a 1.0 postadaptive mode through 2.0 to a 3.0, preadaptive mode, for each of the 13 driving disciplines and associated component parts of Journey-judgment model of Execution Excellence. It helps you assess your opportunities for improvement and architecting a BREAKTHROUGH!
The second 2-sided-card-stock handout of the Journey-Judgment Opportunity Assessment & 90 Day Plan to begin achitecting a BREAKTHROUGH! Click here to download the handout.
How well are you travelling? That’s a question I love to ask teams when starting to work with them, as it is the beginnings of getting them thinking about their agility as an organization. I usually get answers somewhere in the mix of “not too bad”. Then I ask them, “how do you know?” to which I get answers about metrics and surveys and similar things.
Accountability has always been tough but is getting tougher. As The Traffic of Dynamic Complexity has increased in our daily lives, we can feel overwhelmed and gridlocked. As a result, things don’t get done that needed to get done, which anybody could have done (Anybody, Anybody?).
Some things are so elegantly simple (Simplicity & Complexity), they are almost embarrassingly so, which is why most people don’t do them. As a result, they can often be left unnecessarily struggling with the complexity of things and wondering why things aren’t changing.
Like it or not, the portfolio of meetings you run is the gearbox of your business. Meetingsare the collective mecahnism via which everything else meshes together, with the frequency and quality of communication, collaboration and coordination you need as a team for organizational agility.
Fast-cycle teamwork is at the core of our organizational agility, for which we need to rev-up the frequency of our communication, collaboration and coordination as a team. Here is a downloadable article, which you can also share with your team to explain as part of applying these ideas: Fast-Cycle Teamwork - what can we learn from fighter pilots?
Change has changed. The nature of change itself has changed. It has become much more like a dynamic journey on a shifting landscape. We need to be putting on our 3-D glasses for our 3-D challenge.
When faced with situations in which the demands for resources far exceed supply and circumstances are unfolding dynamically in unpredictable ways, we have no choice but to triage. Here are two definitions of “triage”:
“If a picture is worth a thousand words, a metaphor is worth a thousand pictures”, says Daniel Pink in his book, “A Whole New Mind – moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age”. Read the rest of this entry »
Some of the leading edge thinking and research into organizational agility comes (not surprisingly) from the field of software development and the “Agile Software Development” set of methodologies, principles and tools.
Look around your business at how well the wall space is being used, which is often one of the most under-utilized assets in your business. What if your walls could talk with more real-time, on-line-all-the-time information about your business, such as:
Learn to draw! That’s one of the recommendations from Daniel Pink in his book, “A Whole New Mind – moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age”. He reminds us that, “a picture is worth a thousand words”, saying:
Three is a powerful number which our breakthrough thinking can pivot around - keeping the elegant simplicity of “3” in mind helps us understand and solve complex problems. When wrestling with complex problems here are some hip-pocket ways to tap into breakthrough thinking which can come from the power of 3:
Our organizational agility depends upon our mental agility, individually and collectively, to be able to pivot our breakthrough thinking in creative ways, unlocking new perspectives, possibilities and options. Read the rest of this entry »
As the saying goes, “when you need a friend, it’s too late to make one”.
Make friends with organizational agility before it’s too late. When you find yourself in a situation in which you need agility as your friend, or a new level of agility than you have needed before, it’s too late, because:
When you walk into assuming some new kind of responsibility on day 1, that’s when you get to display what I call your “clean-sheet-ability” – the ability to inherit a clean-sheet of responsibility for a situation and start linking and accumulating thoughts, questions, decisions and actions from moment one – in the first few hours, days, weeks, months and quarters. It’s a journey and it’s very telling, as there is nowhere to hide.
In particular in these turbulent, uncertain times, when our approach to execution excellence isn’t clicking well, we experience Wheel$pin, which costs us a fortune in avoidable-costs and opportunity-costs:
Last week was a “5th Week” for me. What do I mean by that?
I design my monthly work pattern/schedule around a 4 week month and yet there are 13 weeks in each quarter, so one of the months has a 5th week in it - or some might call it a 13th week. You might be wondering why that didn’t happen in week 13 of the year, rather than last week, which was week 18?
Agility doesn’t happen by accident, it happens by design. We might be tempted to think that “keeping things loose, unstructured and organic around here” is the best way to be agile. Wrong, unless a chaotic stampede is what you are looking for. We can’t afford for things to be too loose, unstructured and organic if we want agility. We also can’t afford for things to be too tight, structured and inorganic/rigid either if we want agility. It’s an “and” proposition of loose and tight, structured and unstructured, organic and rigid and many other “and” propositions in the mix Read the rest of this entry »
In the face of a complex systemic problem requiring a systemic solution, it can feel like a daunting mountain to climb. If we are not careful, we tend to focus on the peak and the big fix solution which that represents, working backwards from that future with no clear path of how on earth we will ever achieve it. It feels like too big a mountain to climb, especially when it is just one peak in the mountain range of other systemic problems requiring systemic solutions. Read the rest of this entry »
While "beginning with the end in mind" is still a good idea, developing the advantage of organizational agility these days also demands a willingness to get going in the dark, letting the sun rise on the path.
I used the Execution Excellence model as the accumulation of my insight into the challenge executives face in the driving seat of organizational agility these days, and the skills they need to be mastering detail complexity and dynamic complexity.
The head-gear worn by the king is the crown. Cash is King, still - it always had been and it always will be. Some things never change - in bad times, in good times and in great times, surviving and thriving is about not running out of cash! The crowning head-gear has changed though - what did the crown used to be in your industry? Maybe size; maybe reach; maybe deep pockets? Now it’s agility - organizational agility - for cash to be king, that’s what we have to wear as our crowning head-gear, which frames our mindset, our mental-model, the way we are wired.
"Organizational Agility is a core differentiator in today’s rapidly changing business environment" - that’s the number 1 conclusion from a recent (March 2009) report from the Economist Intelligence Unit. Nearly 90% of the executives surveyed (349 business executives from 8 countries, including the US, 19 industries and with revenues ranging from under $500M to over $5Bn) believe that Organizational Agility is critical for business success. Read the rest of this entry »
These weekly tips are to encourage you to "hit singles" - each week, to single out one thing which, in addition to everything else you already have going on, you are going to hit hard to begin brewing up a breakthrough (the home run which will eventually come). 52 weeks of singles will add up to a lot of breakthroughs! Read the rest of this entry »
"Organizational Agility is a core differentiator in today’s rapidly changing business environment" - that’s the number one conclusion from a recent (March 2009) report from the Economist Intelligence Unit, entitled, “Organizational Agility: how business can survive and thrive in turbulent times”. Nearly 90% of the executives surveyed (349 business executives from 8 countries including the US, from 19 industries and with revenues ranging from under $500M to over $5Bn) believe that Organizational Agility is critical for business success. Read the rest of this entry »
Are you truly "tackling" issues or just "tickling" them every once in a while and wondering why not much has changed? Systemic problems require systemic solutions - we have to be tackling the whole and the parts of the system in an organized, simultaneous manner, to orchestrate a breakthrough and allow system performance to pop to the next level. Anything less and we are just tickling the issue and are fooling ourselves that there is going to be any kind of breakthrough. We are just "tickling" the problem, not "tackling" it. Read the rest of this entry »
Month Four of our Fiscal Year (April for many of us) is a time to practice the 3Rs of Re-aligning, Re-enrolling & Re-engaging our team, broadly and deeply across our organization.
Agility requires constant organizational learning and institutionalizing those lessons learned, so that history has less chance of repeating itself, even if it is well disguised. Any time history remotely repeats itself, that is wheelspin by definition, which could have been avoided if we had more traction on continuous improvement and institutionalizing lessons learned. The nameless, rankless debrief can help you.
Achieving breakthroughs is hard work - by definition we are trying to create systemic solutions to systemic problems which don’t happen by accident. We are typically gridlocked with insufficient time, money and resources. To unlock the gridlock, we need to employ the principle of compound interest and the 1% solution.
A recurring and rigorous strategy conversation is about having options. The further up and out we expand the envelope of our strategy conversation then the more options we have – “up” in terms of the altitude of our strategic thinking/ conversation and “out” in terms of the time-horizon of our strategic thinking/conversation (Execution Excellence - missing in action?).
If Alan Mulally, the CEO of Ford, can do it, you sure as heck can! Hold a morning meeting (or a daily huddle at some other time of day) that is. As reported in an article in this week’s BusinessWeek Magazine (Ford’s Savior, March 16th, 2009):
Does your team have what it takes to be a tiger? I love the series of advertisements Accenture has progressively created with Tiger Woods, which speak directly to our work.
We can easily veer off track of the journey to mastery of our organizational agility. There are 5 Dangerous Detours (with tragic consequences) and 10 Mental Modes Avoid Them, outlined in this category of blogs.
We can easily end up being half-brained, with too much empasis either left or right, each being bad news and a dangerous detour with potentially tragic consequences.
Frequently Asked Question: "Why do we need a Traction Plan and an Annual Plan of Goals?" and, in some cases, "Why do we need a Traction Plan when we already have an Annual Plan of Corprate Goals?"
Remember the last time you experienced the benefits of organizational agility – your ability to cope with rapidly changing circumstances and navigate around avoidable-costs and opportunity-costs – think about where that agility came from. Read the rest of this entry »
“We hear a lot about execution these days, which is encouraging. But strategy and execution are only as good as the traction they create and sustain, on a higher road of a breakthrough journey."
“As an executive and then CEO of small-to-medium sized and fast-moving businesses, I experienced an ever increasing sense-of-void. As the pace of business and change accelerated, my experience of most coaches, consultants and trainers coming into my office offering to help was that they didn’t really understand the nature of the seat I sat in everyday..." read more...
And if we’re not prepared, we’re going to die up there. Or we’re going to be in real serious trouble. We need to understand what separates those who do well from those who don’t do well when the world spins completely out of our control. We just finished six years of what we call our turbulence research".
Scroll down and/or click into this item to find the full list of companion links from the book, "
![250px-Charles_Darwin_seated_crop[1].jpg](http://www.sherpaalliance.com/components/com_mojo/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/250px-Charles_Darwin_seated_crop[1].thumbnail.jpg)
“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.” – Charles Darwin.
In his 2007 book, The Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative Thinking, Roger Martin puts it well:
The airframe of a modern 
In his 2005 book, "A Whole New Mind: Moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age", Daniel Pink explains:
In their 2007 book, "Managing the Unexpected: Resilient Performance in an Age of Uncertainty", Karl Weick and Kathleen Sutcliffe say:.jpg)
Jet fighter pilots implicitly understand the real time anatomy of a journey, as they are trained in something called the OODA Loop - 
See 
Journey-ionics is a conceptual model helping us understand journeys at a microscopic level and how we link and accumulate the "ions" of a journey as individual thoughts, questions, decisions and actions.
In his 2007 book, "The Future of Management", Gary Hamel relates pre-adaptation to business and our organizational agility challenge, putting it this way:
A great analogy for organizational agility comes from the field of software development and the emergence of the new paradigm of “Agile Software Development.” Read more at 
We are progressively exploring the three dimensions of the void we need to fill, to be fully filling our role In the Driving Seat of our business and the agility we need as an organization. How we see is how we think is how we act. We are helping you see the three dimensions of the challenge as clearly as you need to. 
The Journey-Judgment Opportunity Assessment translates the 13 moving parts of the Journey-judgment model of Execution Excellence into 13 driving disciplines for reducing wheelspin, increasing traction, and brewing up a 
Bringing Journey Orientation into focus.
Reinforcing a Mindset of Operations Management.
Enhancing Strategic Productivity.
Accentuating Short-Range Culture.
Keeping our Flight Planning envelope expanded to our full Execution Excellence agenda.
New version of Vistage Resource Speaker presentation including links to videos. 
Tackling Operational Productivity.
Holding a Recurring, Rigorous & Rallying Strategy Process.
Re-engineering Structures, Processes & Systems.
Orchestrating a Goal-Setting Cascade & Review Process.
Unlocking & Challenging Mental Models.
Guiding Leadership/Communication Skills & Style.
Handling Accountability for Long-Range Culture.
!ntegrating our Enterprise Execution Capability & Capacity.
The presentation file from my Vistage Resource Speaker Topic. 
The first 2-sided-card-stock handout of Architecting BREAKTHOUGH! Journeys. 
The second 2-sided-card-stock handout of the Journey-Judgment Opportunity Assessment & 90 Day Plan to begin achitecting a BREAKTHROUGH! 
How well are you travelling? That’s a question I love to ask teams when starting to work with them, as it is the beginnings of getting them thinking about their agility as an organization. I usually get answers somewhere in the mix of “not too bad”. Then I ask them, “how do you know?” to which I get answers about metrics and surveys and similar things.
Accountability has always been tough but is getting tougher. As 
Some things are so elegantly simple (
Like it or not, the portfolio of meetings you run is the gearbox of your business. Meetings are the collective mecahnism via which everything else meshes together, with the frequency and quality of communication, collaboration and coordination you need as a team for organizational agility. 
A third 2-sided-card-stock handout of the summary graphic and model. 
Fast-cycle teamwork is at the core of our organizational agility, for which we need to rev-up the frequency of our communication, collaboration and coordination as a team. Here is a downloadable article, which you can also share with your team to explain as part of applying these ideas: 
When faced with situations in which the demands for resources far exceed supply and circumstances are unfolding dynamically in unpredictable ways, we have no choice but to triage. Here are two definitions of “triage”:
“If a picture is worth a thousand words, a metaphor is worth a thousand pictures”, says Daniel Pink in his book, “A Whole New Mind – moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age”. 
Month Six of our Fiscal Year (June for many of us) is a time for a Path-Finding Review.
Look around your business at how well the wall space is being used, which is often one of the most under-utilized assets in your business. What if your walls could talk with more real-time, on-line-all-the-time information about your business, such as:
Learn to draw! That’s one of the recommendations from Daniel Pink in his book, “A Whole New Mind – moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age”. He reminds us that, “a picture is worth a thousand words”, saying:
Three is a powerful number which our breakthrough thinking can pivot around - keeping the elegant simplicity of “3” in mind helps us understand and solve complex problems. When wrestling with complex problems here are some hip-pocket ways to tap into breakthrough thinking which can come from the power of 3:
When you walk into assuming some new kind of responsibility on day 1, that’s when you get to display what I call your “clean-sheet-ability” – the ability to inherit a clean-sheet of responsibility for a situation and start linking and accumulating thoughts, questions, decisions and actions from moment one – in the first few hours, days, weeks, months and quarters. It’s a journey and it’s very telling, as there is nowhere to hide.
In particular in these turbulent, uncertain times, when our approach to execution excellence isn’t clicking well, we experience Wheel$pin, which costs us a fortune in avoidable-costs and opportunity-costs:
Last week was a “5th Week” for me. What do I mean by that?
Month Five of our Fiscal Year (May for many of us) is a time for another Quarterly Traction Review.
In the face of a complex systemic problem requiring a systemic solution, it can feel like a daunting mountain to climb. If we are not careful, we tend to focus on the peak and the big fix solution which that represents, working backwards from that future with no clear path of how on earth we will ever achieve it. It feels like too big a mountain to climb, especially when it is just one peak in the mountain range of other systemic problems requiring systemic solutions. 
These weekly tips are to encourage you to "hit singles" - each week, to single out one thing which, in addition to everything else you already have going on, you are going to hit hard to begin brewing up a breakthrough (the home run which will eventually come). 52 weeks of singles will add up to a lot of breakthroughs! 
Are you truly "tackling" issues or just "tickling" them every once in a while and wondering why not much has changed? Systemic problems require systemic solutions - we have to be tackling the whole and the parts of the system in an organized, simultaneous manner, to orchestrate a breakthrough and allow system performance to pop to the next level. Anything less and we are just tickling the issue and are fooling ourselves that there is going to be any kind of breakthrough. We are just "tickling" the problem, not "tackling" it. 
Month Four of our Fiscal Year (April for many of us) is a time to practice the 3Rs of Re-aligning, Re-enrolling & Re-engaging our team, broadly and deeply across our organization.
Agility requires constant organizational learning and institutionalizing those lessons learned, so that history has less chance of repeating itself, even if it is well disguised. Any time history remotely repeats itself, that is wheelspin by definition, which could have been avoided if we had more traction on continuous improvement and institutionalizing lessons learned. The nameless, rankless debrief can help you.
Achieving breakthroughs is hard work - by definition we are trying to create systemic solutions to systemic problems which don’t happen by accident. We are typically gridlocked with insufficient time, money and resources. To unlock the gridlock, we need to employ the principle of compound interest and the 1% solution.
If Alan Mulally, the CEO of Ford, can do it, you sure as heck can! Hold a morning meeting (or a daily huddle at some other time of day) that is. As reported in an article in this week’s BusinessWeek Magazine (Ford’s Savior, March 16th, 2009):
We can easily end up being half-brained, with too much empasis either left or right, each being bad news and a dangerous detour with potentially tragic consequences.
We can easily default to simplicity this side of complexity, which is bad news and a dangerous detour with potentially tragic consequences.
We can easily give into the presure of premature closure, which is bad news and a dangeous detour with potentially tragic consequences.
Like anything we offer, the key is a compelling value-proposition, 
We can easily lapse into "either/or" propositions, which is bad news and a dangerous detour with potentially tragic cosnequences.
We can easily talk ourselves out of planning, which is bad news and a dangerous detour with potentially tragic consequences.
Execution Excellence: Missing-in-Action
Mike's Own Journey
See Mike giving one of his keynote speeches,