Servant Leadership - A Better Org Chart

Servant Leadership: Breakthrough Ideas on Customer Service

The traditional org chart is all wrong. It puts the people that work directly with your customer at the lowest position on the pyramid. This makes the customer the least important person in the picture. Servant Leadership will flip that pyramid. What if your leaders saw their primary mission as support for those closest to the customer? What kind of difference would that have on customer loyalty and satisfaction?
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A Nice Knock-Down Argument

Sales and the Gantt "Why exactly does he want to meet again?" I could sense the exasperation in Karl's voice, faintly; the sales manager wasn't about to slip out of his professional demeanor over some perceived technical triviality. But for the fact that the request was coming from his newly-hired PMI maven, he probably would have found a convenient excuse to skip the invite. "I just don't understand why we need this meeting ... the projects are moving forward, we…

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Can you, should you, bother Executives with The Details?

In a recent post on Thinking Faster, Phillips expresses concern about the apparent propensity for project sponsors to skim over the details and jump to quick answers. He's talking about [what I believe is] a peer relationship, when external expertise is brought in to develop the solution that they (the sponsors) are responsible for "owning" (vision, design, execution, and ongoing support). I've seen the same sort of thing in multiple organizations, especially when talking with executives about projects and initiatives…

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There ain’t much IT in IT Management

This morning, I caught myself looking back at the last week of meetings, e-mails, and conference calls, and I experienced a minor epiphany. If I published a detailed diary of the ebb & flow of proposals, debates, and commitments from the past few days, I could successfully deflate the management aspirations of 80-90% of the technical folks I know. Contrary to what many might think, there's not much IT in IT Management. Ok, that's a bit of an overstatement; I…

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Fractal Business Issues – Katamari Damacy at Work

Business issues / problems are like fractals. You can drill into the details or see things at a high level. The trick is to be able to understand what level you are looking at, and what level other folks may be at, and the relative difference that can contribute to missed communications. Some conversations at work this week have been interesting, and in hindsight I realized that I was seeing priorities / objectives / issues at one level, and my…

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Sell your Boss – Some Tech Observations

Saw this great post from Hyatt (referred from this blog, definitely worth syndicating) re: how to get decisions / results out of your manager / boss. Great stuff, pay attention to the details here, all of it is right on. A few additions I'd make to the list ... Keep it short - just like you, your boss is juggling multiple priorities, especially when you're reporting to a C-level person. If you can't develop and present an elevator pitch version…

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