It was very quiet. I stood at the front of the room in front of a large group: executives, board members, and committee members. We were there to develop a new three-year plan. “The future is always changing. What trends and influences do you see in our world today that could affect...
Make your change a combo!
If you’ve traveled on a big airplane, you might have noticed that when you lock the door in the bathroom, the light comes on. Some smarty pants connected two actions to prevent an embarrassing incident because in our rush to finally get in and go, it’s easy to forget to...
How to Draw a Culture
I live in Calgary (see the map!), a city in the province of Alberta, Canada. A research team asked locals to “draw an Albertan.” What does a typical Alberta resident look like? Would it reflect our growing tech sector? Our obsession with winter sports? Drumroll please!Almost half drew farmers and cowboys. Nearly unanimously male....
How to run a status meeting
I hate status meetings. Well, most of them.On large projects, status meetings typically pull together a number of people to update leadership about progress. And while each person speaks, a portion of the audience zones out because their work is unrelated. Or worse, they multi-task and forget to tune back...
Begin your Project with Failure
A primary role of change leaders is to blow the whistle early when a program is at risk of failure (see last week’s article). To prevent failures, wise leaders run a pre-mortem to minimize risk.You are likely familiar with the term post-mortem: An investigation of the cause of death. While...
Your Initiative Needs a Canary
“Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) can be credited with many of the agency’s most flamboyant successes in planetary science. That’s why the aerospace world was surprised last year by the lab’s failure to deliver an asteroid probe on time, a stumble that NASA responded to by postponing a JPL-led Venus mission....
How to recharge your soul
I’m sitting at Gate D21 of the Las Vegas airport waiting to board. Motion catches my eye - a person emerging from a recently landed flight is waving vigorously at the person beside me. He gets up and waving back hurries to embrace his friend. Massive grins ensue. I look...
A Path Through Chaos
“Today I’m pleased to present a new vision for our company! We are going to make our competition look like junior players when we roll out service capabilities they’ve only dreamed of! To do that, we will replace several of our major systems, overhaul our data, introduce cutting-edge AI capabilities,...
Take Your Garbage With You
It doesn’t take long to notice the absence of something in Japan we take for granted: garbage cans. Traveling from Tokyo to Hiroshima, train announcements reminded us to take our garbage when disembarking. No cans in the stations and none along the streets. The only receptacles available were for recycling....
Make the Future Tasty
Returning to Japan has been a fantastic experience punctuated by fabulous food. If you’ve never been, small restaurants are everywhere. And I mean EVERYWHERE. Choices are endless.When you’re looking for a good restaurant in another country, how do you decide? We navigated by sight. It’s common in Japan for restaurants to...
