Better Results Faster
"Poor fit!" "Didn't deliver!" "Things changed!" 40% of executives fail in their first 18 months. The vast majority of the roundabout, convoluted, euphemisministic explanations we hear for those failures are subsets of one of those three: fit, delivery, adjustment. And whomever we’re talking to almost always thinks the failure was someone else’s fault. New [...]
Image via CrunchBase Wild times at Hewlett-Packard. Leo Apotheker is out and Meg Whitman becomes H.P.'s fourth CEO in six years. That's always disruptive. Couple that with the various shenanigans and miss-steps H.P.'s been through and Whitman has a particularly tough challenge. I wrote two articles on the situation this morning. "Meg Whitman's Day One [...]
There is a strong argument to be made that an organization’s culture is its only truly sustainable competitive advantage. Plans can be duplicated. People leave. Processes atrophy. Even patents expire. Cultures endure. The Los Angeles Urban League's Blair Taylor has taken a long-term approach to two cultural changes simultaneously. He has taken his time converging [...]
Let me be clear from the start. Most cheating is bad. Fraud, dishonesty, unfaithfulness are hard to condone. But some cheating is good. No one gets too upset if a shortstop cheats towards second base or a center half-back cheats towards the left side. 100-day action plans are some of the highest, best forms [...]
We spend the vast majority of our time helping new leaders create and implement 100-day action plans. Over the past decade or so, I can not think of a single instance in which a new leader actually followed the original plan he or she created. Think Darwin. Survival of the fittest is survival of [...]