Hail to the Chiefs
One day, I received a phone call from a former client who had just been promoted to a new position at his company. He told me that he...
The Boys Club
I was sitting with one of my clients having lunch in her company’s cafeteria when the topic of discussion turned to men and women in the...
Life As War
Another phenomenon parallel to The Lawn Mower Syndrome is the prevalence of war themes and analogies not just in business but in everyday...
The Lawn Mower Syndrome
An ongoing client of mine for many years was a large Fortune 500 industrial products company with a hodgepodge of different divisions,...
The Butterfly Effect
I once worked on project at a huge consumer products company that was contemplating a major upgrade of the computer systems used for...
Unophobia - America's #1 Psychosis
I once worked with a pharmaceutical company that had launched a new product that was very important to the company’s future. It was the...
Metrics Gone Wild
One of my early consulting assignments was on a project at a major US retail bank that was instituting a companywide productivity and...
False Economies of Small Scale
I was sitting in a traffic jam one day, and a politician was being interviewed on the radio. He was arguing for spending a sizeable sum...
The Dashboard Fallacy
Back in the 1990’s, Executive Information Systems or Executive Decision Support Systems, better known as “dashboards”, were all the rage....
The Magic of Metrics
I believe it was Peter Drucker who first said, “What gets measured gets done”. No truer words have ever been spoken. In my 40 plus...