Through involvement in a community group, I had the opportunity (or drudgery, depends on how you look at it, I guess) to sit through six companies presenting their “solution” to a need. After they were all done, it was obvious which company was the best. And everyone, meaning about ten people, who had heard the presentations, agreed. When was the last time you had ten people agree on something easily? Yeah, that’s what I thought; hard to think of a time when you have, right? With this being said, the obvious winner knew what they were doing. But it wasn’t
I drive within a 50-mile radius of my home quite often to meet with clients or potential clients. On one particular drive from one town to the next, the highway used to be lined with dozens of nursery wholesalers. Thousands upon thousands of trees, shrubs and plants used to grow along this stretch of the highway and many of the remnants of these nursery farms can still be seen. Why would all of these nurseries locate side by side? Wouldn’t that increase the proximity of their competition, thus decreasing their potential sales? This small, rural Alabama phenomenon about nurseries can also be
By Kris Dunn It’s one of the unwritten rules of management. It’s also one of the hardest things for new managers to wrap their heads around. “It’s not your fault, but it’s your problem.” Let’s deconstruct that a bit. New managers were often very high performing individual contributors (ICs). The great thing about being an IC is that you only have to worry about one person – and that person is you. But your performance as an IC convinced us that you’d make a good manager of people. For the most part that’s true. One point that sneaks up on
By guest blogger: Scott Mayo Schools love to measure things. With accountability being the buzzword in educational circles, measurement has become an even greater priority. However, we often fall trap to measuring things that are easy to measure, not because they are the most important things. Leadership is one of those important things – we all want it – that has been notoriously hard to quantify. How do I know that I have a teacher who is a leader? Kris Dunn, HR professional and blogger, has suggested we consider the ideas of Leadership Gravity and Leadership Birth Rate to
“The culture of any organization is shaped by the worst behavior the leader is willing to tolerate.” What departments and/or managers do people in your company clamor to get into? What drives this clamor? I’ve seen it before. No one wants to work in finance, but everyone wants to be in marketing. Or everyone is trying to figure out a way to work for manager A instead of having to report to manager B. What is driving the popularity of the department or the person, and should we pay attention to it? Is the number of people who want to