Building an Agile and innovative Organization

 Building an Agile and innovative Organization
- By Kathy Harris
[Wall Street journal]
Operational excellence, an innovative spirit and persistent agility are three defining business strategies that will drive organizations during the coming decade.
 
- Surveys show that 80% to 90% of executives say innovation is important to their organizations, yet fewer than half take overt action to formalize [...]

Leadership – Marshall Goldsmith

Mr. Goldsmith is one of the world’s leading CEP coaches.
- He abhors three words: “no”, “but”, “however”. He says “It is a bad habit. The word ‘but’ means disregard everything that came before this.”. It is distracting.
- Somewhere along the way leaders have inclucated bad habits, like winning too much. It is important that we [...]

What makes an effective Leader

Source rediff.com
What makes an effective leader
November 22, 2007 09:39 IST
 
The cult of the heroic leader remains strong.
– Loren Gary, editor
Effective leaders are not born with the gift of knowing how to lead. Rather, they gain experience, they absorb knowledge, they see and listen to the world around them – both inside the organization and beyond. Effective [...]

4 Reasons Why Tech Consultants Get Sacked

 
Source baselinemag.com
 
October 17, 2007
4 Reasons Why Tech Consultants Get Sacked
By Laton McCartney
The biggest sins: Promising what can’t be delivered and not closing the loop in client communications. To do either is to invite calamity.
 
 
Not long ago I interviewed a representative from a tech consultancy that was involved in a systems upgrade. The project was progressing as [...]

Working as a consultant

Source: Unknown

1. Business is made up of ambiguous victories and nebulous defeats. Claim them all as victories.
2. Keep track of what you do; someone is sure to ask.
3. Be comfortable around senior managers, or learn to fake it.
4. Never bring your boss a problem without some solution.
5. You are getting paid to think, not to [...]

Freakonomics – Fundamental Ideas

Notes from the book Freakonomics

1. Incentives are the conrnerstone of modern life and understanding them – or often, ferreting then out is the key to solving just about any riddle, from violent crime to sports cheating to online dating.
2. The conventional wisdom is often wrong. Conventional wisdom is often shoddily formed and devilishly difficult to [...]

What is business intelligence?

Source: Wall Street Journal

WSJ: What is business intelligence?
Mr. Davenport: It’s the systematic use of information about your business to understand, report on and predict different aspects of performance. Historically, it has had a number of names. It was called decision support when I started my career…It’s been called business intelligence for about a decade now.
WSJ: [...]

Sam Zell on Selling and Risk

 
Sam sold Equity Office Properties, the real estate investment trust he had built over decades, to Blackstone for $39 billion. At the time, business publications were unconvinced. “Is he cashing out too early?” One headline asked.
 
Instead as wenow know, the sale was at the top of the market, and only months before the credit meltdown [...]

One Trick Pony – Google

Google bought YouTube for $1.65 billion and claims one day it will make money from advertising, but for now it bears the rapidly increasing cost of storing and serving billions of videos most of which are watched by nobody. Google has courted similar unrequited expenses to bring users free business software, email, WiFi, a forthcoming [...]

The Difference between FOCUSING on PROBLEMS and FOCUSING on SOLUTIONS

Case # 1: When NASA began the launch of astronauts into space, they found out that the pens would not work at zero gravity (ink will not flow down to the writing surface).
Solution # 1: To solve this problem, it took them one decade and $12 million. They developed a pen that worked at zero [...]