The problem with trying to improve things is that you need to be able to measure them. That’s one of the reasons people love productivity and efficiency so much – they are generally easy to measure, but effectiveness – that’s a different matter. You need to know what’s your effectiveness…
Many will be looking at attempting to plan for the coming year but with things moving so quickly there is a temptation to fail to plan on the grounds that everything will change. What we need to do is see how to be effective in uncertain times. Uncertainty is not…
Work from home has exposed a huge problem that has been sitting in so many organisations like a ticking time bomb for so long. That of poor management and even worse leadership. We have seen a large number of high profile organisations (you know who you are) with “leaders” and…
One of the mistakes so many leadership courses make is that they teach how to lead others but forget that effective leaders start with themselves. If you can’t lead yourself then you stand no chance leading others. One of the founders of VISA, Dee Hock is famous for saying “if…
Times are hard, for both businesses and individuals and we need to look at effectively increasing profitability or in the case of individuals income. There are many ways of doing this from increasing sales by cutting prices to cutting costs but we need to look at how to effectively increase…
We keep hearing about the vision of the organisation or the company mission statement This strange because organisations can’t have visions but people can. An inanimate organisation can’t have vision it’s only the people in it who can. The trick of a good leader is to lead people in the…
Planning is really important. We all know the saying fail to plan and you plan to fail but too much planning is ineffective. It’s actions that cause things to happen, not plans. Very often planning can be used as an excellent excuse for inaction and procrastination. “We can’t start yet,…
What’s the next big idea? We are constantly looking for big ideas to solve problems (especially things like climate change, lifestyle etc) and increase productivity, but little things mean a lot. The power of compounding is too often ignored in favour of quick high-profile fixes. In his book Essentialism Greg…
The problem with the constant drive for productivity and efficiency is that it leaves little or no time for future improvements. Effective people do today what makes them better tomorrow. Effective organisations do the same. The strive for short term results particularly if you are reporting to a short-sighted organisation…
If you want to do something for free in a specific market, say for a charity, that is fine but everyone else should pay the correct price. Certainly, don’t do work for free or give away goods on the “sprat to catch a mackerel” principle. We’ve all done it. Tried…