Category: Blog

If we look back over time, we see a lot of small, entrepreneurial organizations that have gained advantage over large, behemoth organizations. We look at Amazon now challenging Wal-Mart, and they started from an idea from Jeff Bezos's mind. He thought to put this stuff online and sell it out to the world because it's easier to get to. And it's this type of thinking in these small entrepreneurial organizations that gives them a huge advantage from an innovation standpoint. In large organizations, the opposite is true - they have become protectors of wealth. Large organizations are risk averse types of organizations afraid to rock the boat. But organizations don't learn by doing something they already know. They learn from failure. Russell Ackoff really put this in simple terms. He…

I want to continue down this path to define what it is that I mean by being effective and synthetic versus being efficient and analytical. And so to continue down that path, one of the phrases uttered to me years ago by the late W. Edwards Deming was, "By what method?" And this really changed my attitude and thinking about how organizations should improve themselves and be run and things of that sort. So let's talk a little bit about methods of efficiency versus methods of effectiveness. Methods of efficiency - or if you will remember "doing things right" -  are things like technology, I.T. systems, automation. Those are things that can make you efficient, but they can't make you effective. You could be automating something that is completely wrong to…

I'll share with you a secret from working with many global organizations - ninety nine percent of executives are analytical thinkers and one percent are synthetic thinkers. And the reason I say this is, I believe it to be true, I don't have any survey or scientific study on it. But just my observation over the years and even the one percent that are synthetic thinkers are usually in systems where they can't operate with their brains being in a synthetic mode. Efficiency is "doing things right" and being effective is "doing the right things." And so when we look at the way organizations are designed and the way that we improve performance, we talk in terms of these individual types of silos that exist in organizations. So, for instance, we…

There's the concept of being efficient versus being effective. You could be very efficient at running the meeting. But if the meeting is focused on the wrong things, then that efficiency isn't very effective. And some people use the metaphor of rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. If you are efficient, you can look really good. "Oh, look at the empathy this executive shows." This isn't to say "empathy" isn't important but it won't make your organization better.  There are thousands, literally thousands of podcasts, leadership blogs, and things of that sort. I am not diminishing their importance just pointing out you need to be more than nice to be an effective leader. My focus is on giving new methods to improve not only your thinking, but the organization,…