Ideas are free, execution is priceless.

In an organization, being a leader involves more than simply finding solutions for problems within your direct responsibilities. It also involves addressing the problems that might impact everything that relates to your overall work experience. That’s the impact of systems thinking. By seeing and respecting the contextual structures that underlie complex situations, you can share observations and suggest ideas for creating improvement across the entire organization. Even if they…

Dilbert’s human resources manager once told him that it was a burden to remember his name, so from now on, he would refer to him as either buddy or big guy. The employee responded, how about I just get a nametag? Then you could just read it. To which his manager replied, do I look like I have that kind of time? Interestingly enough, sixteen years later, that iconic…

Systems thinkers look at the whole, not just the parts. They judge the worth of a system based on its end to end effectiveness, rather than on how efficiently individual parts operate. Ackoff, the organizational theorist, consultant and professor, was one of the pioneers it the field of systems thinking. One of his notable rants was about the fallacy of efficiency. He said the righter we do the wrong…

Nametags are my favorite accessory, but also my favorite analogy. If there is a particular idea, story or experience that needs to be conveyed in an interesting and persuasive way, my default linguistic tool is to refer to it as a nametag. If an idea is sticky and playful and human and disarming, that’s a nametag. If there is a person who makes a small, simple effort to connect…

Phenomenology is the study of consciousness. How things appear in our own subjective, direct experience. Husserl, the founding father of this discipline, said that the number one job of the phenomenologist is to describe. To denote any ordinary thing or object or event as it presents itself to our experience, rather than as it may or may not be in reality. What’s beautiful about this philosophy is, it’s wildly…