Yearly Archives: 2016

Mistakes happen when you’re learning to ride out the ever-changing business cycle. In fact, most startup companies and divisions make the same ones. In the new product or acquisition phase, many departments get scant resources and little attention; unless they are doing something that actively hinders the growth product, they’re mostly ignored. This makes the people in those areas feel sidelined and left out. Resources and people may have been taken away from their departments [...]

With a title like that, you may be asking, “Is this going to be an adventure story?” Well, yes - and no. The kind of Avalanche I’m talking about doesn’t involve snow; it’s part of the life cycle of your business, but it can be nearly as overwhelming if you’re not ready for it. You’ve started a company, gone through the growing pains, and you’ve enjoyed a boom as your product or service took off [...]

Thinking in terms of cycles is a way human beings make sense out of life. Cycle Theory can be applied to just about every natural, social and historical concept there is, from world power cycles to international relations cycles to sociological and psychological cycles. What all these cycles have in common is that they form a circle that goes around and around, carried forward by a natural, ceaseless momentum - and they’re not easy to [...]

Habit is a powerful thing. That can be a good thing—but not always. In the house where my family used to live, there was a counter on the left side of a double sink. When my mother washed the dishes, she washed them in the right-hand sink, rinsed them in the left-hand sink, and put them in the drainer on the counter to the left of the sink. If we’d had a dishwasher, it would [...]

So – you dropped a bundle on the newest cutting-edge software that the salesperson assured you was the magic bullet to solve all of your problems – yet costs are still going up, and processes are still bad. How could this be? You’ve got the best possible technology! As a company administrator, you can see there’s a problem, but you don’t understand what’s causing it – because you haven’t considered the other two factors, people [...]

Congrats - your company has blasted past the start-up phase, experienced the initial whirlwind of success and the growth spurt it engendered, and now you’re preparing to scale up the management structure of this newly complex enterprise. You’ve mapped and analyzed, strategized and reassessed integrated and aligned; now it’s time to execute your plan. How can you smooth your transition’s road to success, and achieve the kind of company-wide buy-in to the process that you [...]

[et_pb_section admin_label="section"][et_pb_row admin_label="row"][et_pb_column type="4_4"][et_pb_text admin_label="Text" background_layout="light" text_orientation="left" use_border_color="off" border_color="#ffffff" border_style="solid"] Transformational IT projects fail when people cultivate blind spots, refuse to consider new possibilities, or fall in love with the newest, shiniest gadget without knowing if it’s what they really need—and even a small failure at the starting point can lead to a big problem down the road. How can you as a leader keep your IT project on track? Start smart. It’s critical that [...]