Founder’s Corner
19
Talks of extreme events or conditions let us feel bold and visionary for an hour without challenging us to confront our blind spots or step into the unflattering realities of leadership. But isn’t it time we expected more from ourselves—and from the spaces designed to make us better leaders?
There’s a lot being written about Elon Musk and Twitter right now, but I wanted to address his leadership, what’s happening with leadership in general right now, and my own thoughts on continuing to use the platform.
The following is advice I have offered in the past to folks on my team struggling with their writing at work.
A collection of data and reporting from credible third-parties that paints the picture of the most tumultuous year of work in recent U.S. history
A craftsperson is someone who practices a trade or discipline with the ultimate goal of mastery. Anyone, in any discipline, can be a craftsperson if they so choose. Each and every one of us has the capacity to do good work of some kind.
If we want to build back better and foster greater organizational resilience, we must first define what “better” means, for whom the changes are meant, and how to begin.
To survive in a VUCA environment, we must re-conceptualize organizations and leadership
Big consulting is taking a beating these days in culture. And, frankly, it’s long overdue.
A controversial rule for those making change
Product/market fit was a term coined by Marc Andreesen and defined as, “being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market.” Culture/market fit is similar, yet even more foundational. Find yourself a healthy market, yes. Then develop a culture that can deliver product/market fit.
It can be difficult to give order to the mess that is an organization. After all, business is the commercialization of human interaction and well, people are messes of complexity. Our tool, the Org Charter, helps make sense of all that complexity.
"Culture" has been seen as too soft, too fuzzy, too threatening of a word to use outright. It's time to embrace it.
Your boss will likely be replaced, to some extent, by an algorithm. Might that be better?
Org Design services may seem costly now, but without a focus on how your teams work best together, the results may ultimately be far more expensive. Moreover, now is an opportunity to hone OD as a competitive advantage in your market while your competitors are unaware of the opportunities and still question the returns.
What would you do if you had to convince people to work with you, without getting a paycheck? Yes, explaining purpose—how their work contributes to the bigger picture—is a good start, but it may not be enough. Individuals respond differently to different forms of motivation, and part of your role as leader is to figure out the right mix for your team.
For this year’s SXSW V2V conference in Las Vegas, we wanted to share why startups fail even after they’ve found product market fit. Drawing from our own clients and researching more than 40 firms that had either scaled woefully or gracefully, we’ve distilled the most frequent pitfalls into 6 categories: