“It’s not what the vision is, its what the vision does.” Peter Senge The imagination is an amazing thing. It allows us to see the future and reconstruct the past. It helps us to understand what we can not directly experience while creating the folly of misunderstanding or miscommunication. It can give us pleasure and… Read More
What is this Strategy Stuff?
Sometimes at work we hear about strategy meetings. The executives have a strategy meeting. Corporate managers can have an off-site strategy meeting. Managers in a retail store or supervisors in a coffee shop can have strategy meetings. What they heck is strategy and why do people meet about it? The dictionary indicates strategy is a… Read More
We Have an Opportunity to Change
A group at work started some sessions to establish our vision for the function we perform. The individuals in the group range from quiet to expressive. They all have skills with some specialization learned over years. A few things struck a chord that resonated with me and the topic of this blog, Managing the Business… Read More
Working with our Mental Models
There are two kinds of properties that we deal with every moment of our lives. There are those things we can control to varying degrees of influence. These are manageable properties. Examples of manageable properties are our reactions to our situation, our attitude, our choices to pursue an action, and most importantly, our attention. And,… Read More
What’s your Mental Model?
Per Wikipedia: A mental model is an explanation of someone’s thought process about how something works in the real world. It is a representation of the surrounding world, the relationships between its various parts and a person’s intuitive perception about his or her own acts and their consequences. Mental models can help shape behavior and… Read More
An Honest Day’s Work
Just because we show up to work doesn’t mean we work the full day. We all have inefficiencies. There are distractions. There are interruptions that take our focus off the task at hand. In science, there are no methods of work that are 100% effective. The second law of thermodynamics which deals with disorder and… Read More
Adjusting our Expectations
This week, my four-year old son was having some difficulties at school, but so were all the other kids. When I inquired with the care provider, I found there had been two substitute teachers, one care provider on vacation, and one provider moved on to another job. The result was a short staff and bringing… Read More
The Power of Listening
The other evening, I watched my four-year-old son start crying because his sister was too busy doing her own thing and not listening. My son adores his sister. He mimics her in all kinds of ways. He has also taken on her trait of talking up a storm. So, like his sister when he talks… Read More
Our vision breathes life into our daily activities.
As Peter Senge points out in the Fifth Discipline, when there’s no shared vision within a company, there’s no common identity or goal amongst the employees. As employees, we can see this lack of vision. Division objectives are set without taking into account operational capability and efficiencies. Departmental goals are disjointed accomplishing an improvement here… Read More
Why Worry about what Others Think
I love it when my daughter reads my posts and comes to me with ideas of what to write about next. Earlier this week, she encouraged me to write about, “Not worrying about what people think about you. It only matters what you think about yourself. People can not force you to think differently about… Read More
Business of You 