It’s easy to say things, much more difficult to do them. Increasingly we have the ability to comment on the words of others. If you have time to waste have a look at the Twitter accounts of any politician followed by a mass of comments. Some valid, some not so.…
It’s a great way to start the day. “Today I’m going to be effective.” It’s first thing in the morning, no new emails, no phone calls and you are ready to go. Next thing you know it’s six or seven or eight p.m. and what have you done? Answer, exactly…
Ethnography is the study of a particular human society. The important point for consultants is that it is almost entirely based on fieldwork and uses both quantitative and qualitative methods. It involves the person carrying out the study (usually an anthropologist) to immerse themselves in the culture and everyday life…
If you don’t respect your competitors you will never learn from them. So many organisations hate the fact that their competitors are based in low wage economies or low tax areas and spend their time complaining about “not competing on a level playing field”. Instead of hatred or envy, they…
Big Data is the way ahead they say and there is no doubt that data is very important. However, let’s not throw out the baby with the bathwater. Experience over a number of years often brings about an instinct that cannot be taught or, at present replaced by big data…
I hit a milestone last week by publishing the 100th effectiveness blog post. So, lets summarise what I have learned from 100 blog posts. Here are five of the highlights: First of all, the most important thing. Effectiveness is not the same as efficiency or productivity. The Difference Between Effectiveness, Efficiency…
In a previous blog we looked at Why Targets Are Often Not Effective This was hopefully interesting stuff but more important is how to set effective targets. If you read the management books they will tell you that targets should be SMART, standing for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant & Time Based.…
Targets without an objective can never be effective. A target a something that, if achieved moves us toward our objective. If we do not know what the objective is then we cannot produce targets. The problem is that many organisations give out targets without making the objective clear and that’s…
Time management is the ultimate example of maximisation of a limiting factor (much more on limiting factors in later blogs). We all have the same 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day and 365 or 366 days in a year. No matter…
In order to understand why managers are not effective but leaders are, we need to understand the difference. Management is about productivity and efficiency. Leadership is about effectiveness. The problem for managers is that the problems of efficiency and productivity have been solved. We have all the techniques, Lean, Prince,…