As a manager, one of the few things you cannot delegate is developing your people. In fact, even when you do delegate, it must involve developing. Don’t take my word for it: Here’s the Harvard Business Review’s approach. Think of it as a bullseye (free download here). What training, coaching and feedback do you need to give in order to …
Horn Sections Make Rock Better: Popscene
I love Britpop, this album and this song. Blur–portrayed as a boy band in the British press, including a manufactured rivalry with Oasis–were really an art school band. Many of their songs are commentaries on modern life. This one fits right in, almost three decades later.
The Greek’s intentional culture: no financial and moral negligence
Costly culture failures That’s not meant to be an over-the-top headline. But I hope it sobers your thinking on your “intentional culture.” I shared this article with clients in 2018. It reviews several of the scandals that took down business leaders and organizations at the time. (Those scandals have since been replaced with yet more scandals and takedowns.) A money …
Trust: Old Lessons for a New World
Are you trying to set sales appointments with online leads? Talk to vendors or partners over the phone? Videoconference with employees? This article is packed with practical insights for any of us who are trying to build trust remotely. The author–a trust specialist–makes a point that we’ve been doing this already in a number of ways.
Pay plans and happiness
In 2018, Fast Company had an article about how much money you need to be happy. (There does seem to be a dollar amount, but after that, it doesn’t really make you feel that fulfilled—it takes other stuff in your work to do that.) The article was featured on LinkedIn. It was fascinating see how people reacted to the article’s research. A number …
Horn Sections Make Rock Better: No One Knows My Plan
Like the Bunnymen and their Echo, They Might Be Giants originally performed and recorded with a drum machine. That includes all the way to their breakthrough album, Flood. Flood turned 30 last year, which is weird since I’m pretty sure it was just yesterday. The Giants have been churning out genius for decades now. I’ve always imagined John Henry, the …
Fast Company on the power of vulnerability
An incredibly successful client had an employee team blow up. They were originally excited to be tasked by management to address a big employee headache. It was to improve a process that touched a lot of people in the organization. And then the team self-destructed. It was due to poor communication and ego. (But isn’t it almost always that?) The …
Horn Sections Make Rock Better: Sweet Pear
This is the song that inspired this series. I already had Elvis Costello in my top 5. But when I first heard this song a few decades back, I had a new favorite Elvis song. You’re hearing the Dirty Dozen Brass Band take EC to a new level.
A sector that thrived in 2020
If there was one word I became sick of in 2020, it was “unprecedented.” It was a good way to hedge bets: Things can be unprecedentedly good or unprecedentedly bad. So I appreciated this article from automotive vendor Roadster sidestepping “unprecedented,” “good” and “bad,” going straight for the obvious: “crazy.” But dust is starting to settle in Crazy Town. The …
Engineered customer experience: Walk matching talk
Engineered customer experience I work with Soft Shoe, a phenomenal store in Richmond, Ky. that takes customer experience seriously. (That’s why its Facebook page has almost 34,000 likes!) We ended up partnering after the owner and I were geeking out about the following engineered customer experience I had: In 2015, a client recommended I visit Unger’s Shoe Store in Ironton, …