The new year is upon us and for those that know me or have read some of my year end posts over the years you know I like to use this time to set some personal goals. I am not a believer in New Years Resolutions, but I do think it is a great time […]
Tag Archives: Planning
Oh Sh#*! (Or Managing The Unknown Unknowns)
If you’ve ever worked on something even remotely disruptive or innovative, you know about unknown unknowns. They are the unexpected things that happen that it is impossible to predict. Customer feedback that doesn’t align with your assumptions. Unexpected alternative uses of your idea for other purposes. The competition reaction to your new offering. None of […]
Connecting Strategy and Execution
I will be speaking next week at the Bank-IT Conference on the topic of “Building a Full Stack Strategy: Integrating Strategy from Business Vision to Tech Execution” so I felt that I would share some of my thinking more broadly here. While my discussion next week is focused on the Technology area, connecting strategy to […]
Your Meetings Suck – Admit It
How many meetings do you go to every week where you walk out feeling frustrated that in the span of 60 minutes nothing got accomplished, nothing moved forward, and the only apparent outcome is the follow-up meeting that will be making its way to you via an email meeting invite during the next 60 minutes? […]
Take Time to Preflect
At the end of every day or experience we know the power of taking time to reflect on what happened, how we behaved, what decisions we made, and how everything turned out so we can learn and grow from our experiences, but there is an equally powerful exercise that can help you start your day […]
The Importance of a Plan
I think I’ve always just naturally broken my professional work down into planning steps and then executed according to that plan, even if it wasn’t done in a formal project plan format. Whether it was a small initiative or set of to do’s that just needed some framework or a major program that needed a […]
Sometimes The Unexpected Should Have Been Expected
Many times in our career, business, or life we experience unexpected events or twists in the road that catch us off guard. A big client pulls their business at a critical time, we find ourselves displaced from our job due to restructuring or cost savings, or we have a personal event that shakes the foundation […]
New Year Goal Setting
While I don’t necessarily subscribe to the concept of New Years resolutions, I do believe that the New Year provides us with a good annual marker to check in on how we are doing against our personal roadmap and validate that our goals are still relevant and aligned to where we want to go. It’s […]
Are You Running in Circles?
Over the past few weeks I’ve been involved in a number of situations where urgent requests have been made of people and teams, and they have diligently run off at pace to deliver an appropriate response only to discover (days and weeks later) that their interpretation of the request wasn’t correct, or worse yet to […]
The Importance of Book Ends
Take a look at your book shelf. You might have a nice built-in bookcase, an IKEA Billy case, or perhaps an open shelf on the wall, but any of them will do. Now imagine that your book shelf didn’t have any sides or book ends… how easy do you think it would be to keep your library […]