Do you find yourself experiencing any of the following? Team members or vendors coming to you with deliverables that are meaningfully different from what you asked for Employees missing the “big picture,” and spending too much time on trivial things you’d mentioned in passing Employees misinterpreting your curiosities or suggestions as directives Being surprised by...
While it’s a nearly unbearable cliche to talk about how we live in an “information age,” I believe success as a leader or manager requires a deep understanding of what exactly working in an “information age” actually means. As of 2018, over 90% of the data created in the history of our species was created...
Nearly everyone has a story of a boss who was worse than useless, or small nimble teams that apparently self-organized into excellence. The changing nature of work and the failures of past modes of management has brought numerous future-of-work thinkers to question the need for managers at all. In the reflections below, Jeff shares his...
In our Sensemaker two weeks ago, we introduced the Enterprise Clarity Model (ECM), the 4 key areas for clarification within an organization: goals, leadership, culture and management. This week, we’ll dive a bit deeper into how we think about management. We find with many of our clients that delivering excellent clarity management is the key lever for creating...
THINK Creating Clarity for Remote Teams As concerns about COVID-19 mount, many companies are experimenting with having more of their employees work from home. As with any context shift, this change brings with it both opportunities and significant potential confusion. The companies that navigate it well will have a competitive advantage, and not only from...
Jacob Morgan over at Forbes has a great write-up about a recent meeting he held with HR and business leaders about The Future of Work . Talentism is about systematically unleashing human potential, and so I read Jacob’s piece with great interest. We have different points of view about some of his findings. Our perspective: The...
The data are clear: it’s easier to win in Vegas than hire the right person. Hiring managers waste an obscene amount of time interviewing the wrong candidates because 1) they don’t know what they need (and not because there’s a dearth of talent) and 2) being human, they succumb to confirmation bias. CEOs everywhere are...
A recent article published in the aptly named “Schumpeter” section of the Economist lamented the rise of “Digital Taylorism,” the modern incarnation of a mechanistic management theory from the 1930s. A primer: [Frederick] Taylor’s appeal lay in his promise that management could be made into a science, and workers into cogs in an industrial machine....
This week, we continue our exploration of the New Business Playbook (NBP), the mental reference guide that today’s business leaders must use to confront today’s business realities in order to achieve their goals. In previous posts, we have discussed how the NBP thinks about vision, strategy, design, and jobs very differently than the Old Business...
It’s easy to poke fun at LinkedIn’s Endorsements feature. Nearly all of us have been endorsed for some marginal skill by some kind soul who knows nothing about that skill or our expertise in it (“Thanks, Aunt Gerta, for endorsing me in…enterprise software?”). Even LinkedIn’s highest paid recruiter platform doesn’t support searching for people based on...
