What Is Failure?

Failure is nothing more than a few errors in judgment repeated ever day over a period of time.

How often have you or someone you know seen something that is not working in a business and take the attitude that it just doesn’t matter enough to do something correct it, eliminate it or even improve it? Most of us have been guilty of falling into this philosophical trap of “it just doesn’t matter.”

These errors in judgment get repeated because people don’t think they matter. Over time, accumulation of poor thinking leads to poor choices. Read more

The Stages of Team Building

The Tuckman-Jensen analysis of the stages of team building has become a foundational piece in understanding how teams come together or pull apart, how they perform well or fail to meet desired results.

Tuckman and Jensen state that teams go through five stages of team development:

1. Forming—the search for commonalities

2. Storming-breaking away from false harmony into individual power displays, leading to rifts between team members. There is a tension in this stage between unity and individualism.

3. Norming-behavior in this stage is more about consensus between team members and more of a shift from “I” to “We.” Read more

The Formula For Success

One of the questions we must answer to have greater success in business and life is this:

How can we change the errors in the formula for failure into the disciplines required in the formula for success? The answer is by making the future part of our current philosophy.

Both success and failure involve future consequences, namely inevitable rewards or unavoidable regrets resulting from past activities.

So what do we need to do daily to be on the path to success? We must develop the discipline to look down the road every day. Read more

Attitude

Attitudes are affected by what we know since what we know determines he decisions we will make. Where our philosophy deals with the logical side, our attitude focuses primarily on emotional issues.

What we know determines our philosophy. What we feel determines our attitude. Here is the key point to remember. In business and life it is our emotional nature that governs most of our daily conduct in our personal and business worlds.

I have heard many well intentioned people say to others: “Be more logical. Don’t be so emotional.” That’s an interesting statement. Interesting because there is a strong emotion attached to it. Be more logical. Read more

Culture and Change

When culture and change meet, culture always wins.

Lasting success lies in changing individuals first; then the organization follow. And organization changes only as far or as fast as its collective individual change.

To strategically change your organization, you must first change the individuals. Too often, change fails because we don’t start with the individuals.

To change, individuals within an organization have to redraw their mental maps. If people are not remapped then they cannot break through the brain barrier of exchanging the old, familiar way of doing things and embrace the new, change. Read more