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?
Traditional “Strategic Planning & Implementation” tends to go something like this:
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 »
Month Five of our Fiscal Year (May for many of us) is a time for another Quarterly Traction Review.
Execution Excellence: Missing-in-Action“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."
Mike's Own 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...
See Mike giving one of his keynote speeches, Breaking Through to a New Future .