Hurricane Ian was sending us a message: Humans, it’s time to put your act together. It’s time to REBALANCE.
Tag: leadership
Productivity Challenges in the Knowledge Economy
Recently, Google announced a productivity improvement crusade. This is not unexpected. Google appears to be following the steps of many tech companies that went from boom to bust pretty quickly. It is noteworthy that they all had similar strategies and roadmaps, as many of them would become deliriously successful (read: obscenely profitable), then stagnate, and […]
Strategic Management of Shareholder Value: Coincidences? (part III)
Rogers Communications and Shaw Communications expected to have their merger to be closed by July 31. It must be a coincidence, but July 31, 2022, marks the 100th anniversary of Milton Friedman’s birth. Apart from that, nothing else in Rogers Communications’ history, including the recent outage, is a coincidence. Rather, everything is a natural outcome […]
Calm Down.
Is it Thursday yet? I just read somewhere that Thursday is the worst day of the week for many employees – especially for those of us who want to establish that divine work-life balance… By Thursday, they may easily blow the lid unless the pressure is released by a 5-to-7 beer or by the prospect […]
What Steve Jobs Knew Before the Great Resignation
Steve Jobs may have been a controversial leader – but a smart one. And there was something that he understood particularly well and used as a foundation for his management approach.
Really, What Makes an Effective Executive?
Whenever I ask this question, I always hear the usual sacred mixture of “integrity,” “willpower,” “leadership,” and, of course, “charisma.” The most promising HiPos would proudly throw in “emotional intelligence.” Those fuzzy buzzwords are supposed to make all aspiring executives salivate but none answers the question or offers at least a practical first step. For […]
Project Managers Not PMPs: A Hard Look at the Soft Practice of Project Management and PMP Certification
If you are a manager of any level, you probably expect to become a good manager. As we are all accidental project managers because we have to manage a project every once in a while, so we should all be able to benefit from this course. And I say “we” because I will be learning through your feedback.
Fifty Years of Shareholder Value
Here’s what Henry Mintzberg, Cleghorn Professor of Management Studies, at the Desautels Faculty of Management at McGill University in Montreal, thinks about shareholder value today: “Shareholder value has nothing to do with human values.”
Post-Lockdown Employee Engagement Survey
As we start seeing the light at the end of the COVID-19 tunnel, we realize that we are not going to get back to normal. The new normal will be different. The pandemic crisis has been an “up-or-out” test for most businesses. Only the teams that have engaged employees will come out stronger. As a […]
Productivity, Happiness, Engagement and IQ
I merged and analyzed the available data on GDP (per capita), national IQs, happiness, and employee engagement worldwide, for 93 countries. My goal is to come up with practical suggestions to business leaders; thus, these observations are focused more on qualitative results and trends than on the “scientificity” of the idea. Here are my observations focused on qualitative results and trends.