Unlike many of my colleagues, I have never worked in management consulting or really spent much time developing a consulting skill set. Rather than starting my career at McKinsey, Deloitte or Accenture, I spent my early years working in advertising.
Check Your Ego at the Door
For me, going to the gym is more mental than anything else. It helps me clear my mind, relax and focus on the day ahead. I do a lot of weight lifting, but in actuality the whole ordeal is much
Managing Transitions
To support my recent fascination with the art of organizational change, this week I read Managing Transitions by William Bridges. The book talks about how to take a company through a significant transition and provides a step-by-step guide to successfully
A Team is only as Strong as its Weakest Player
If you choose any saying and repeat it enough, it tends to take on a life of its own. That was the case my sophomore year of college. Barely a day would go by when I wouldn’t hear this phrase:
Business History, the Manhattan Skyline and Adapting to Change
Following my entry last week, I’ve been thinking a lot about the topic of Business History. I really find it fascinating. All of the dramatic successes, the colossal failures – people have been doing business for thousands of years. Think
Business History
Background One of my best professors in college was named Paul Calhoun. Standing out among my most influential teachers, Paul is unique in that he is not an academic; rather, he worked in business for 30+ years, and then retired
The Topgrading Interview Method
Update 8/27: Be sure to check out the comment on this post by Brad Smart (whose book, Topgrading, I reviewed here). —– This week I finished reading Topgrading by Bradford Smart. Overall I liked the book; that is, once I
Discovery Driven Planning
As the weather gets warmer and Q3 approaches, most companies are starting to think about business planning for next year. In light of planning season I wanted to write just one more short entry based on learnings from Clayton Christensen’s The
Deliberate and Emergent Strategies
Taking yet another page out of Clayton Christensen’s The Innovator’s Solution, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about deliberate vs. emergent strategies and their role in launching a new initiative. Christensen describes a deliberate strategy as a course of action
On Industry Consolidation
Looking back over the past 200 years of human innovation, it’s easy to focus only on the winners. General Motors, American Airlines, Hewlett Packard, Macy’s – giants in their respective industries. However, these corporations were not always so dominant. Largely