During this cold and flu season (and having already been stricken with the seasonal bug), something about the concept of a virus struck me as a great lesson for leadership. (OK, maybe it’s the cold medication talking, but stick with me for a minute and we might get somewhere). In the wild viruses strike fear […]
Author Archive: Tim Empringham, MBA
(In)effective (Mis)communication
The age of electronic communication has brought with it some incredible advances. Email, text messaging, BBM, instant messaging, Tweets, Likes, and +1’s are firmly embedded as mechanisms we use every day to communicate with each other both one on one and socially to an audience. With each of these advances though we see a progression […]
Throw Strikes With Your Pitches
Nothing strikes panic in the heart of many people in the same way as an opportunity to speak to a large crowd or to present to a Senior Executive. Glossophobia is the formal name given to the fear of public speaking (or speaking in general for that matter). While it is an extremely common fear, […]
Good Enough to Great
Perfect is the enemy of good is an old proverb from Voltaire which asserts that a drive for perfectionism can prevent you from accomplishing a task at all. Especially when a good enough result could be achieved with far less effort. Perfect results are limited by the law of diminishing returns. By setting the bar […]
What’s the Why?
Many of us who started our professional lives in a problem solving role have become experts at diving in and developing (and delivering) elegant solutions when we think we see a problem brewing. Unfortunately too often our tendency to “problem solve” prevents us from successfully defining the problem in the first place. Our comfort zone […]
How Tired Is Your Metaphor?
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before… Many great joke tellers know to preface their jokes with this old saying, to prevent themselves from losing their audience with a joke or anecdote that their audience has heard before. So why is it so rare for corporate storytellers to give their audience that same common […]
The “Art” of “Leadership”
In the 1920’s we saw the birth of the “big band“, an ensemble of up to 25 musicians that played a style of jazz that was more akin to orchestral music in its style with very little improvisation and primarily based on rote reading of sheet music – following the plan in a specific and […]
Leadership Health Care
Does your organization behave like many individuals when it comes to problem resolution, or do you have a proper health care system in place to manage issues? Many people (myself included) have a tendency to treat their symptoms with over the counter drugs or with non-medical remedies passed down through our families, even when the […]
Shooting Arrows at the Moon
About a week ago stories started surfacing about the possibility of resurrecting the Avro Arrow as a potential replacement for the troubled F-35 Stealth Fighter purchase for the Royal Canadian Air Force. For those who don’t share my adoration for the Arrow (otherwise known as the CF-105) I’ll provide a brief summary of its short […]
Snakes and Ladders
In “First Things First“, Stephen Covey categorized work into a four box grid aligned to the “importance” of work and the “urgency” of that work. the clear motivation is to stop doing those things that are both not urgent and not important. Second we need to have the strength to stop doing the things that […]