by Triangle Performance Staff | Feb 18, 2010 | Kevin Berchelmann, Organizational Effectiveness
A friend of mine, obviously bored out of his proverbial gourd, sent me a selected piece of text from some reading on “Service Oriented Architecture.”
Here’s what he sent:
Technical staff know service oriented architecture as an architectural style centered on decomposition of the solution along service boundaries aligned with the business and in accordance with sound service oriented principles.
Then my friend appropriately proclaimed, “I’m afraid I’m dumber for reading it…”
Really, guys. Really?
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by D. Kevin Berchelmann | Jan 29, 2010 | Executive Improvement, Kevin Berchelmann
Again, the issue of performance review ratings rears its head…
I always find this topic fascinating; in reality (my opinion), there are only three performance results:
(a) Doesn’t meet expectations,
(b) Meets expectations, or
(c) Exceeds expectations.
All else (in my opinion) are provided for comfort and conflict mitigation, not accuracy. More rating choices enables poor performance management, in my mind.
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by D. Kevin Berchelmann | Dec 29, 2009 | Executive Improvement, Kevin Berchelmann
So, there’s this question on LinkedIn, asking a plethora of “strategy consultants” a valuable, fairly straightforward question:
“Should we spend more time and effort on developing strategy or focusing on implementation?“
Now, never mind whether you believe we should focus more on strategy or implementation, per se. For the record, I believe that — pound-for-pound — we need more execution (implementation) today. But frankly, that’s a separate conversation, and we can have that later.
(more…)
by D. Kevin Berchelmann | Dec 8, 2009 | Executive Improvement, Kevin Berchelmann
Succession Planning. The final frontier… to boldly go where damn few have gone before, no matter how frequently they talk about it.
A recent article in the Houston Business Journal references a survey about succession plans at mid-cap and large companies. Well over 50% do not have enough successors identified to weather one or more key departures, and only 37% claim to even have sufficient future management available (never mind ready)within the organization.
Are you kidding me?? It is the height of irresponsibility to suggest that senior leadership is focused on the future — on longer term, strategic ideals — when it cannot weather a small storm caused by the departure of just one or two key leaders.
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by D. Kevin Berchelmann | Nov 9, 2009 | Executive Improvement, Kevin Berchelmann
Sometimes, I just don’t understand. When any portion of a strategy isn’t working… when any process isn’t providing a result… when any instance of productivity is reduced… these can always — ALWAYS — be traced back to leadership influence.
Why, then, does training those leaders seem to be such a struggle in most organizations? Why is leadership development even a conversation? Not which development, what approach, or how best to accomplish… all of those make sense. But whether we do it or not??
That, friends, should never, ever, be a question. (more…)
by D. Kevin Berchelmann | Oct 1, 2009 | Executive Improvement, Kevin Berchelmann
Multi-tasking is a crock. Always has been, always will be.
Participants in my leadership sessions have heard me say this, and I’ll repeat it here: “I don’t care who you are, how much money you make, what your title is, or where you went to school… you can only do one thing at a time.”
Just one. You can have a whole bunch of things in various stages of incomplete, you can have several things waiting for your attention, and you can have things so teed up that you move near-seamlessly from one task to the next.
But you’re still moving from one task to the next. (more…)
