Researcher, writer, thought leader
Ottawa - Ontario
Researcher, writer, thought leader Ret'd federal government. Labor market forecasting. Leadership development, Masters in Economics and Masters in Leadership and Organizational Learning. Avid Jazz lover. Outdoor recreation (mountain biking, snowshoeing and hiking)
243 articles
The past several posts focused on teams and viewed them through a more or less conventional lens. Now we do a 180 and question some of this thinking. So hang on, here we go! Teams, teams, teams! This...
My recent posts explored what it means to be a team, the five levels of teamwork, how to build performance, the four major team player types, and the four stages of team development. It’s important th...
Today, we’ll look at the four stages of team development and incorporate the four team player styles that were presented earlier. (Reading What Kind of Team Player Are You? is helpful to understanding...
In my last post I talked about building team performance . Today, we look at what kind of team player you are. An effective team needs diversity in its membership, a combination of work and personalit...
In my last post we looked at The Five Levels of Teams: Where Are You on the Team Performance Curve? We’ll now move into the really challenging part of creating teamwork. Are you ready? There’s no idea...
In the previous post Is Your Team REALLY a Team? Why Instant Pudding Doesn’t Cut It we looked at the six basic elements of what constitutes a team, and specifically the two key ingredients of teamwork...
Teamwork is talked about widely in organizations, but often with little understanding of what it means. And now with the transformations of the workplace due to the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic—changes early i...
Many years ago, I watched Eco-Challenge 2000 on the Discovery Channel (a show that ran from 1995 to 2002), a fascinating event encompassing teamwork and leadership. This was my first experience watchi...
Accountability has become one of those words used in organizations that make people wince. Many years ago, when I was getting initiated to the leadership field, it seemed that almost every second word...
The human race is an odd species. Adaptive to immediate threats and catastrophes, we as humans have also time and again shown ourselves to be slow learners. Whether it’s the sickening loss of life fro...
When we look back to the 20th Century and reflect on great leaders, whether leading nations, organizations or social movements, there’s a tendency to produce a list with mostly male names. However, wh...
Your faithful correspondent has been a long-time proponent of self-empowerment, writing extensively about its role in effective leadership. It’s something many of us have struggled with during our car...
We live in the age of instant gratification. We want it now as consumers—hence the exponential growth of credit since the 1960s, whether in credit cards, conditional sales contracts, automotive loans...
Franklin Delano Roosevelt rates as being one of America’s greatest presidents, probably in the top three. Yet he was despised by many during his ascendancy to president and during his four term tenure...
We’ve all had good bosses, and more likely bad bosses that outnumber the former. This post is a more provocative commentary on leadership; however, it has important lessons for those people wanting to...
I am your servant. I do not come to you as a leader, as one above others. When you read these words did the person who uttered them come to mind? Admittedly, the world is adrift in leadership quotatio...
Date Line: 1994, Forbes Magazine THE NEW POST-HEROIC LEADERSHIP ”Ninety-five percent of American managers today say the right thing. Five percent actually do it.” That’s got to change. Post-heroic lea...
The literature on inter-generational differences has been in hyper-drive for a while. Think tanks spew out analyses; book authors produce their take on the situation; bloggers convey their perspective...
The leadership field—and its cousin management—has an over abundance of information, from books, periodicals, business articles, blog posts, web sites and more. Much of it is repetitive, and many prom...
The following 10 lessons are not aimed at just those who wish to move into managerial positions; they’re also for those who work as project managers, team leaders, thought leaders, relationship builde...
The world is getting smaller, shrinking steadily due to rapid advancements in telecommunications technology. Work is being distributed to countries that would have been scorned at a decade ago. As muc...
The process of building our personal leadership skills isn’t done overnight. That’s rather obvious. However, what may not always be clear is that leadership development within organizations is, at its...
To say that the first two decades of the 21st Century have been packed with major change events is an understatement. From the now 20-year war in Afghanistan, the Iraq war and the contrived conditions...
Human beings have an innate sense of wanting to belong to a community. It’s genetically ingrained in us. This leads many people to actively seek out a like-minded group, or tribe, to join. It might be...
You’re at a work meeting. One of your co-workers is giving a Powerpoint presentation to 30 people from both your work unit and two other units in your organization. It took your co-worker two weeks to...
Tajichi Ohno was born in 1912 in Dalian, China. As a young man, he was hired by Toyota Automatic Loom Works. Toyota was later sold to Platt Brothers, a British Company, prompting the Toyoda family to...
The first couple of years of Donald Trump’s presidency brought out armchair psychologists. Some of these individuals had work-based connections to the broad field of mental health and a few were actua...
Being a leader, in whatever capacity, is not a one dimensional affair. There are many ways that each of us can practice leadership: at work, in our community, at home, or in an unexpected crisis situa...
Think of a time when you’ve bought a consumer product or been part of a process, such as filing a complaint with an airline that lost your luggage. Have you ever had any frustrations with how complica...
A baseball bat and a baseball cost $1.10 The bat costs one dollar more than the baseball. How much does the baseball cost? According to Professor of Psychology Emeritus (Princeton), Daniel Kahneman, m...
Populist: 1) A member or adherent of a political party seeking to represent the interests of ordinary people. 2) A person who supports or seeks to appeal to the interests of ordinary people. Adj. Repr...
This leadership post is a look back at one I wrote prior to Donald Trump becoming President of the United States. Much of the numbness from the Trump term has abated now that President Joe Biden has j...
We’re used to watching politicians rely on scripts, prepared by their advisors, the people who lurk in the shadows, typically unseen by the public. Teleprompters have become a favourite tool for promi...
The end is not near. Despite the frantic warnings and incoherent ramblings from pseudo experts, the human race will survive, at least for the time being. But if you’re a junkie for end-is-near message...
Fill in the blank in the following quotation to see if you correctly identify the decade in question: Any company that aspires to succeed in the tougher business environment of the ______ must first r...
There’s no cookie cutter recipe for leadership. Each leader, or potential one, has a unique personality that has developed from the immediate world in which the individual grew up and matured. Our men...
This leadership post is about building the collective brain power of a nation, from which innovation and technology advancement emerge to strengthen its global competitiveness, and in turn its economy...
Our world is not black and white—the Manichaean view— when it comes to the wide array of interconnected issues and challenges facing those in leadership roles. Whether you’re a politician leading a de...
Abraham Lincoln was elected President of the United States on November 6, 1860. Soon after, he faced what would become his biggest leadership challenge: seven states seceded from the union, with the s...
We read and hear a lot about the importance of vision when it comes to senior managerial leaders focusing their organizations on the future. It’s important stuff, and the leadership literature ensures...
Technology is everywhere in our lives. Innovation through personal leadership is constant. It’s been that way for hundreds–make thousands–of years. Indeed, some of the biggest technological inventions...
We’re adrift as a society, seeking leadership for the way ahead. We strive for meaning in our nano-second lifetimes on Planet Earth. And we hope for some measure of contribution to our community, and...
Models, while appearing to many people as boring and immaterial to the real world, do have a very useful role to play in helping us understand better the dynamics of change. In the context of this pos...
I was a young greenhorn economist with just a tad of related work experience. I’d worked in consumer lending after college for two years, but had grown disgusted with the countless hours I had to spen...
I never liked Timothy Geithner from the start when his tight-lipped, grim face began appearing regularly on the nightly news during the 2007-2008 financial meltdown and the ensuing Great Recession. Al...
We all wear filters which affect how we perceive the world. Let’s call it our leadership lens. No one is immune–even super smart people. And there’s nothing wrong with that. The challenge is for each...
Scientists see chaos as essential for organisms to renew and revitalize themselves. The same is true of organizations. When people go through a very difficult period, they emerge stronger and with a g...
The world has been fascinated with Pope Francis since he assumed the top leadership position with the Catholic Church on March 13, 2013. It goes without saying that the top job at the Vatican is deman...
In Canada, the problem of lying and deception by prominent leaders is skewed into the political sphere. The United States, in contrast, is more of an equal opportunity employer, with an abundance of d...
People have a love for fads, whether it was the Hula Hoop in the late fifties, the big hair bands of the 80s, or the moon shoes of the nineties. When it comes to workplace issues, we become enthralled...
When your correspondent entered the leadership field in the early nineties, not long after starting work as a middle manager, the economy was rebounding from a recession and a new buzz around leadersh...
Many lessons are and will continue to be learned from the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic and resulting Covid-19 illness. In particular, the history book will not be kind to our society, notably the contradictory...
Leadership can be viewed as a process of influencing people. That’s no big revelation. However, the challenge arises when a leader wants to motivate their team or assist in their professional developm...
“ The most effective leaders appear to exhibit a degree of versatility and flexibility that enables them to adapt their behavior to the changing and contradictory demands made on them .” Ralph Stogdil...
Our changing business landscape that is being driven by the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic is rapidly placing more and more companies under extreme pressure. Depending on the sector, many won’t survive. All of t...
To say that the workplace has changed a lot in the past decade, with more changes imminent, should not come as a surprise to anyone. It’s almost become a trite statement to talk about the rapid change...
When either thrust or eased into a leadership role, one of the outcomes is the leader being expected to have some, or even all, of the answers to problems facing the work team. As one moves up the org...
Think of a time when you worked with a group of great people, where trust prevailed, where your leadership had earned a followership and where everyone worked towards the same vision. It doesn’t have...
Note: A few years after the 2008-09 financial crash and ensuing Great Recession, I wrote a post on leadership lessons. Then I updated it following the arrival of Donald Trump as the 45th President of...
Dateline: June 18, 2014: The bangs were incredibly loud. Across the street the shoppers at the liquor store and grocery store plaza were startled. The nearby homeowners called 911. And the staff at th...
It seems that a number of people want to be scientists, or at least in the sense of ostensibly adding credibility to their respective field of work. Economists (of which I was a practitioner for 35 ye...
Have you had enough? Of change that is. As 86 year-old American poet and author Maya Angelou once said, “ If you don’t like something, change it. If you can’t change it, change your attitude .” Angelo...
Cities come in all shapes and sizes. Trying to rank cities by size gets rather difficult because of municipal boundaries. What’s relevant is using accepted urban/metropolitan boundaries to define a ci...
Salman Khan was working as an analyst at a hedge-fund in Boston in 2006. Being a bit of a math whiz (with four degrees from MIT and Harvard) he had been tutoring family members and relatives. He had a...
It’s generally well accepted that the key reason why Great Britain prevailed during World War Two was because of how its citizens came together during the eight month Blitz which started on September...
If you know everything there is to know then you can take a pass on this post and move on to something else. You’re still here–thought so. We live in a society of experts, pseudo experts, and wannabe...
As a human race, we tend to jump to conclusions and write off people who appear to have no hope. The same applies to companies, which are legal entities but nonetheless composed of living, breathing h...
So how’s that teamwork coming? Are you and your fellow co-workers doing enough collaborating? There’s been a ton written on the topic over the past two decades-plus when teamwork became a popular conc...
Once upon a time, there was a CEO of a pet food company who wanted to increase his profits from making dog food. So he consulted the wisest men in his company, who knew about developing computer progr...
As an equal opportunity consumer of news, I make a point of reading, viewing and listening to divergent sources on TV, print, radio, and online. Podcasts became an add-on a year ago. While a centrist...
Humankind’s ability to rise to crises and extraordinary challenges has some prominent examples from the past. When things appear bleakest, with no light at the end of the tunnel, there’s a tendency fo...
Leaders of nations have perpetual challenges—small and large, short-term and long-term. Sometimes these challenges come with ample warning, perhaps months in advance as a crisis builds. Other times, t...
When John Steinbeck wrote his epic novel The Grapes of Wrath in 1939, he searched for a title but came up empty handed. His (first) wife, Carol Henning, suggested a line from a section of the lyrics o...
Dateline: March 1933 “ Old people were particularly vulnerable. Guaranteed pensions were a rarity in the 1930s; workers expected to save for their retirements or work until they died. But bank failure...
Hardly any faculty is more important for the intellectual progress of man than ATTENTION. Animals clearly manifest this power, as when a cat watches by a hole and prepares to spring on its prey. – Cha...
Jim Prince, a Tennessee businessman, succumbed to cancer in November 1998. As he fought the cancer over the course of many years, he came to realize that he “…had never done anything to benefit future...
“Out in the farm country, anyone connected to liquidation lived in fear of being lynched. A Kansas lawyer who handled a foreclosure was found dead in a field. An Iowa judge was dragged from the bench,...
“ Don’t sweat the small stuff .” We’ve heard that expression a lot in the past and still occasionally today. It was made popular in the self-help and pseudo leadership literature in the nineties. Inde...
Dr. Li Wenliang was born on October 12, 1986, in Beizhen, China. He died on February 7, 2020, in Wuhan, the capital of Hubei Province. He was 33 years old. He died unnecessarily. An ophthalmologist, D...
Elderly people cowering in their cars, too scared to enter the grocery store because of the huge crowds of panicked shoppers who clean out many shelves, from cleaning products to toilet paper to non-p...
We think a more open and connected world will create a stronger economy with more authentic businesses that build better products and services. We expect governments will become more responsive to iss...
How often have you started a project at work, or been part of a community effort that took some time to get off the ground, to discover partway through that your team had lost its way, unsure of what...
I moved a lot as a kid. Born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, I was only a few months old when we moved to Montreal where we lived for a few years before heading to Battlecreek, Michigan, for two years (where I...
Sometimes we’re reading something. Anything: a magazine, a book, or an online article. And then we have what’s called a brain fart. An idea pops into our mind, only to stay there for a while, waiting...
Planet Earth is experiencing a whole lot of hurt. Human activity and its relentless push for economic growth, accelerated by emerging economies that wish to elevate their standards of living to replic...
There are lots of smart people out there–people with high IQs who seem to absorb vast amounts of information and who are capable of regurgitating just the right politically correct statements that get...
Society at large has been hijacked. We’re consumed with the newest gadgets, whether it’s the thinnest most dazzling smart phone or tablet; the automobile that can find its way to a parking space by it...
Capitalism has been having a rough time lately—witness the attacks from some of the candidates for leadership of the Democratic Party. The financial crisis 12 years ago, originating in the United Stat...
Do you like a world that’s orderly, where at work you know what’s about to hit you–basically a predictable environment? Or do prefer the unknown, never quite sure what each day will bring, and not jus...
Human beings perceive themselves as Planet Earth’s supreme beings. Just look at what the human race has introduced to the world since the advent of the Industrial Revolution in the mid-1700s: the stea...
Another year has come to a close. It was a world of ups and downs, whether in the stock and bond markets, geo-political events, or in technology. It’s easy to feel lost in a sea of change, where we ha...
We’ve all heard the adage: You can’t over-communicate when you’re in a leadership position. The faulty assumption is that people–employees–need to hear the same message over and over again if it’s to...
So you think you can manage change? Good luck. It’s time that change management proponents ditch the hubris and naïve optimism that change can be managed. In reality, it’s about adaptation and learnin...
The leadership print space is full of books, with a never-ending supply hitting the bookshelves, not to forget digital readers. So it’s always a pleasure to find a gem in the rough, considering that m...
How many times have you filled out an employee questionnaire at work, dutifully responding to questions ranging from training and development opportunities to communication to teamwork to leadership?...
Dateline: Summer 1941 . The troops weren’t happy with the country’s leadership. A lot of hyperbole had been generated during the previous two years about the Nazi threat to the United States. Because...
As with much of my leadership blogging over the past ten-plus years, my approach has been to integrate what may at first appear to be unrelated events and concepts. However, we live in an inter-connec...
Customer service is in the dumps with most companies and publicly funded organizations. We all have our favourite stories of horrendous customer service. Whether it’s the retail clerk smacking gum in...
Before launching into this post, take a few minutes and think of a few key learning experiences in your life. Then reflect on these three questions: a) Were any of them work related? b) Were they all...
In Part Two you’ll meet Daniel Goleman, to whom most people refer when speaking about emotional intelligence. ( Click here to read the first part of the series on emotional intelligence ). As society...
