Mitigating Weakness
By playing to your strengths, by focusing on activities that make you feel strong, you will have an easier time mitigating the effect of stuff that drains you.
The Two Things
Two of my clients are approaching change in their organizations from distinctly different perspectives and I think a short discussion of each situation might provide some food for thought to anyone contemplating a shift in their status quo.
Jump start 2013 with a StandOut assessment
Get a jump of 2013. You have a native genius, we all do. But that natural ability gets bruised and bullied by the urgencies of running a business. A 90-minute StandOut debriefing session will help you refocus on activities that make you feel strong.
Cannibalize or die
Discussion about the counter-intuitive suggestion of growing a business by encouraging subsidiaries to cannibalize existing under-served customers. 17-minute podcast interview from HBR.
Manager Training VS Leadership Development
Drawing from academic and business writing, this whitepaper acknowledges the organizational imperatives of vision and productivity and presents an argument for a more intentional approach to training in those skills specifically related to managing teams of people.
"Hang Up" and other antiquated terms
Clarity in conversation–written and verbal–is something I see as a way of reducing confusion and improving outcomes. If conversation clarity is something you'd like to tackle, here's an exercise that will help you get started:
Leveraging strengths to improve collaboration – TV Interview
You want to form a very effective team – who would you select? A group of random generalists who will try as hard as they can to do whatever it is you want them to do? Or – A group of individuals who have demonstrated expertise in the various elements of the task at hand?
11 Years and 5 Lessons Later
You can't clone success. Every day begins with new challenges and opportunities. You only succeed when you apply today's answers to today's problems. The most foolish thing you can do is to rely on past solutions for future dilemmas.
Lagging Indicators – Driving Ideas #14
The key to this whole strengths thing is to look for ways to add activities to your calendar that make you feel strong. Don't wait for them to happen, make them happen.
The world before Mac
Compared to the hilarious and widely popular "I'm a Mac" commercials of a few years back, this one seems rather tame.