A recent, deeply felt loss has left me thinking about the importance of customer service. My father in law passed away about one week ago, and the trials and tribulations of attending his memorial and internment made me realize how...

I read with some interest the New York Times article in yesterday's paper about the challenges that Sprint, the US cell phone carrier, is having. For years Sprint has had really poor customer service and compounded that by an arrogance...

Working with a number of senior managers and executives from some Fortune 500 firms, I increasingly find that all of them seem to be measured with a new statistic - meeting minutes consumed. Often, the only valuable time you can...

NPR is running a nice series this week on the trials and tribulations of email. Specifically, the series is addressing how many emails we receive and the distractions that email presents to most workers. The show has also profiled a...

Most of us have been through some dramatic change in our lives - whether that was a personal relationship or a significant change at work. However, if we are honest with ourselves, we'll admit that most people really don't enjoy...

Every once in a while it helps to release a bit of the spleen - so apropos of nothing, here's a blog about how muddled our thinking has become. I was listening to NPR on a long drive yesterday and...

I've come to the realization that all of our existing management mantras are all wrong, but not for the reasons you might suspect. Yes, it is important to optimize processes, to innovate, to drive shareholder value and to do all...

I am increasingly alarmed at the number of people who are not willing to spend the time necessary to plan and run an effective project, program, or task. I have just left a conference call where we were helping a...

In my email today I had a newsletter from CIO magazine about the barriers to productivity many firms face from their enterprise software. This newsletter refers to a study about software usability conducted by IFS, a mid-sized ERP vendor. While...

I've had a chance to do something few people ever do - read a book I really enjoyed about what must appear to be a very dull subject. Well, if you are familiar with Scott Berkun and his writing, you'll...

Everyone wants to know how to "change" their corporate culture to achieve the goals they want. In some cases this means more risk taking. In other cases it means more productivity. In any case, corporate change happens in two ways:...

Doing some debriefing on a recent project, we were a little disappointed to discover that our carefully planned communication campaign that ran in conjunction with the project did not seem to create as much awareness and enthusiasm as we had...

It seems only natural to blog about a book like Groundswell, a book recently published by Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff from Forrester Research. After all, the book is about the growing importance of social networking applications - blogs being...

Every once in a while an idea comes along that is so simple, but so profound, that you have to stop and consider it. Last week in our local paper a book was profiled that is exactly that - simple,...

Working with a partner firm not too long ago, I heard that one of their base beliefs was to value "truth over harmony". I wrote that down at the time and decided to write about it, since I thought it...