Why is the poor employee an afterthought in the process ?

Living in a world where customer experience is the ultimate goal I sometimes wonder whether organizations lose a bit of internal focus and forget about the employee experience. Going from good to great to pretty shocking I’ve been involved in many changes programmes where the directive from on high is to increase cost efficiency, process […]

Retool for your new model year

My mother is getting her knees replaced this week. Both of ‘em. She and my father are true globetrotters. They’ve hiked the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu, boated in the Amazon Basin, visited a Mount Everest base camp, and spanned latitudes from the Svalbard Islands to Tierra del Fuego. It’s not often that a son […]

Your old job is a good place to be FROM

This post was inspired by the article “You want to be fired from your job this year” that appeared on Successful Workplace on Monday. Having been through a ‘job transition’ several years ago, I wanted to share a few lessons that got me through a tough time, and doubtless will come in handy in the future. Your […]

You want to be fired from your job this year

What if being fired is a core component of innovation? What if being fired is the only way to get you out of your going-nowhere job? This is not a “Top 10 reasons…” list. I hate lists. This is simply an explanation of why you should be begging to be fired this year. Moreover, I’m […]

Gamification of feedback makes your team go faster

The following is a guest post by Toby Beresford. Toby is founder of Leaderboarded.com a tool to create multi-variable leaderboards from both business and social data. He can be reached at @tobyberesford. At the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, a smaller British fleet routed a larger  French one, destroying 22 French ships without a single British vessel […]

Can social networks defeat hierarchy in the enterprise?

Watching the Enterprise Social trends emerge has raised interesting questions, not only in terms of the new technology as an enabler but how the enterprise makeup is going to look and operate in the future. Having been involved in many transformation programs, it always amazes me to see the same top-down hierarchical business operating models applied […]

HR chiefs who propel organizational performance

You might think that the corporate human resources function doesn’t have much of a role in improving business processes, such as product development, operations, customer service, or distribution. But I’ve found that it does. HR can propel or inhibit process improvement because it has an outsized influence on people: how they are recruited, rewarded, and […]

Weave change into your HR processes

Profound changes in an organization must be led from the top, but human resource professionals can play a big part in making them happen. Consider HR’s role in accelerating Harvard Vanguard Medical Associates’ operational improvement initiative. This 4,500-employee Massachusetts healthcare group embarked on “Care Improvement” three years ago. Chief Human Resources Officer Dan Michaud told me how HR has […]

Trimming back as the key to improvement

Living in Southern California and having an orange tree in your yard isn’t that big of a deal. We waited years for the first fruit to appear, and when it did, we knew immediately we had a problem. The branches on a small tree couldn’t hold the heavy, green oranges. It was about to split […]

The hierarchy of employment – where are you?

From the top to the bottom: Paid for who you are (credibility)   $$$$$$$ Paid for what you know (knowledge & skill)     $$$$ Paid for what you do (time & attendance)…………………..$$ Are you investing effort to get better at the level you are now, or in climbing to the next level up?

You gotta put in the work

I’m a devout follower of Seth Godin (@SethsBlog). I encourage you to follow him. A recent post focused on how the best strategy in the Universe is useless without a focus on executing the details of that strategy. That really hit home for me as process person. There has been a lot of recent attention […]

Is the social enterprise relevant to you?

Last week, I listened to SAP’s weekly radio program, In the Cloud with Game-Changers, and the topic was the social enterprise. The program featured a panel of the following very talented social business experts: Brent Leary, Partner at CRM Essentials Sameer Patel, Global VP of Enterprise Social Software at SAP Dr. Natalie Petouhoff, Social Media […]