Dealing with vs. Celebrating failure
There’s a meme that has been making the rounds through leadership circles for some time around celebrating failure. If you aren’t failing, you aren’t pushing the boundaries. The original premise of...
View ArticleThe power of Clustering Illusion when managing image
As humans, we are predisposed to finding order out of otherwise random data. When we look at clouds or even a mountain ridge, we find shapes that are familiar to us. When we see data, we instinctively...
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Conformity as an inhibitor to strategy
Early in life, we are all made acutely aware of the power of peer pressure. Most of us probably attribute it to a deep need for belonging. But what if that deep sense of belonging is less about social...
View ArticleOutcome bias and the psychology that prevents sustained success
In psychology, there is a phenomenon called Outcome Bias, which basically means that we tend to judge the efficacy of a decision based primarily on how things turn out. After a decision is made, we...
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Theory of Constraints and common staffing mistakes
In many companies—both large and small—getting staffing right is a challenge. Critical teams are always starved for resources, and the common peanut butter approach to distributing headcount rarely...
View ArticleOn choice-supportive bias and the need for paranoid optimism
In cognitive science, choice-supportive bias is the tendency to view decisions you have made in the most favorable light. Essentially, we are all hardwired to subconsciously reinforce decisions we have...
View ArticleUsing frameworks for effective sales presos
Anyone who has ever delivered a presentation or even listened to one knows that the key to an effective presentation is telling a story. If you peruse even a few pages of any of the books about how to...
View ArticlePlaying politics and self-defeating behavior
If you take an informal survey about the characteristics of dysfunctional organizations, you will probably hear the word politics rise to the top of most peoples’ lists. In fact, many large companies...
View ArticleOn building teams: experience or talent?
Obviously when you hire, you want to find a good mix of experience and talent. But a perfectly balanced straddle between the two is impossible. So when forced to choose between them, which do you...
View Article[Plexxi Rewind] Don’t be the “We already” guy
For folks accustomed to the original blogs we post daily, our industry is in the throes of VMworld bliss, so we will be running the Best of Plexxi this week. Of course, if you haven’t read this one...
View ArticleOn foxholes and corporate silos
The existence of silos in large companies is fairly common. Employees frequently bemoan the misalignment that exists across functional teams and organizational entities whose primary connection seems...
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Visualization Tools for Network Engineers
Networking is a visual field. In fact, we can generalize and say all of IT is. Come to think of it, is there a technical field that isn’t? In this post, I’ll cover a handful of visualization tools...
View ArticleIs your career a destination or a journey?
When most people think about their careers, they tend to think 5 years out and picture the job they would like to have. From there, they back into the things that need to happen, and use that as a bit...
View ArticleThe dangerous practice of behavior attribution
The age-old debate of nature vs. nurture is all about whether our psychological makeup is impacted more by heredity or environment. More simply, is who we are more dependent on our genes or our...
View ArticleAt the office, are you a doctor or a patient?
Everyone experiences challenges at work. Whether it’s an individual contributor or the CEO, everyone has to go through the same basic set of issues that plague virtually all workers everywhere. But not...
View ArticleScenario planning for first-line managers
A common meme in the strategic planning world is that there is no one pre-determined future. The objective in strategic planning is not to forecast a single outcome but rather to identify a number of...
View ArticleYou are a topic at your employees’ dinner tables
The transition from individual contributor to management is probably a bit selfish for almost everyone. In that moment when your responsibilities and title change, you will naturally focus your...
View ArticleThe Bystander Effect: Why companies fail to change
Almost all of us have worked for a company at some point in our careers that just couldn’t seem to get out of its own way. The ideas were right, the talent was strong, but the execution just wasn’t...
View ArticleThe misguided pursuit of empowerment
Frequently in peoples’ careers, ascension to the ranks of middle management is rapid. But then something happens. A small number of people break through, but the majority of folks seem to reach those...
View ArticleHow do you know if you are self-aware?
One of the traits of successful people is that they are self-aware. I think most of us know that we need to be aware of how we are performing. Indeed, it is critical that we constantly iterate on our...
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