Monthly Archives: June 2011

Does your organization grade on a curve? In other words, when assessing employee performance, does your process force you to produce a bell curve with roughly 10% high performers and 10% poor performers, with everyone else falling in the middle? … Continue reading →

When different groups disagree over a limited resource, negotiation becomes necessary. Unfortunately, most negotiations still default to zero-sum bargaining (one side takes more, while the other side settles for less) or interests-based bargaining (an approach that lets each side win … Continue reading →

Are the people who work for you a real team? It’s easy to extol teamwork, but not every group is a team. In fact, most teams we see, aren’t — because their managers focus on building the most effective relationships … Continue reading →

It’s never easy to decide to stop pursuing a strategy. Americans got a reminder of that in President Obama’s speech last week on Afghanistan; it was dispiriting to hear him describe the extended timetable required to remove even just the … Continue reading →

Most managers agree that you need different kinds of leaders in lean and fat times, to preside over growth or retrenchment, to lead organizations out of crisis, or to steer a steady course in an ocean of calm. As a … Continue reading →

You constantly hear how bad stress is for you: it’s damaging your health, jeopardizing your relationships, and hurting your performance. While these risks are real, recent research is showing that work strain, when managed correctly, can actually have a positive … Continue reading →

With fresh faces in organizations and new interns flooding offices, it’s time to really think about what the first steps are for bringing a new employee onto your team. Originally, the process of converting a newly-hired stranger into a fully-contributing … Continue reading →

Anytime a CEO, quarterback, engineer or author is paid ridiculous amounts of money, dozens of investors, armchair quarterbacks, and scholars jump in to debate the value of individual contributors versus teams. Bill Taylor wrote the most recent of many interesting … Continue reading →

Mark Zuckerberg is, of course, correct. So is Mark Andreessen. Some programmers and programming teams are, indeed, 100X more productive than their more typically talented counterparts. Almost everybody who’s seriously worked with serious coders (I have) would acknowledge this. What’s … Continue reading →

If you ask an extremely successful salesperson, “What makes you different from the average sales rep?” you will most likely get a less-than-accurate answer, if any answer at all. Frankly, the person may not even know the real answer because … Continue reading →