Writings

Most managers are severely undertrained. I’d like to do something about that.

A good manager creates more engaging work, aligns a person’s goals with business outcomes in a way that leads to everyone winning and is the catalyst to turning businesses into a force for good. These are some tools, essays, frameworks and stories to help.

*Making sense of all the moving pieces is hard. Having the right tools, frameworks and knowledge is key*

Managers, Continue “Doing the Work”

These are all important aspects of a manager’s day, however, the more time a manager spends doing these tasks, the less time they spend with the customers.

Give Away Information, Build Familiarity

If your business can educate customers (and potential customers) for free, you’ll build better relationships and funnel in more customers. If ACME services and installs new HVAC equipment, they should give out free…

Systematically Collect Feedback (and use it)

Capitalizing on the best features by making them even better to use will delight power users. Speaking of delighting users, try and go out of the way to delight 30-50% of customers, especially…

Create Your Own Measuring Stick

Being able to measure customer satisfaction is a must for all new managers. Without paying customers, there is no business.

On Quality Management

Quality is as important to manage as it is hard to define. Having the tools and frameworks at the ready is critical.

What Is Management?

The cute one liners that define management leave out all the details of what one actually does as a manager. To be an effective manager, step one is figuring out what you are…

Reflection form: Copy and Paste this for your own reflections

Yearly reflections are a great exercise for course correction. If you kept doing what you did this year, will you get where you want to go?

Systematically Collect Feedback (and use it)

Feedback from customers / clients is the only way to understand what their perspective on your business is. Collecting it is a must do activity.

Define a Measuring Stick for Satisfaction

Every industry will have a different standard for customer success rankings. Net Promoter Scores are the most common, but it will vary from business to business.

Theory X and Y for Managers

Managers, like employees, can fall into two main buckets, known as Theory X and Y. The challenge for managers, though, is aligning everyone in a productive way.

On Creativity and Management

Creativity is vaguely defined on purpose. Too rigid of a definition would deflate the meaning entirely. Similarly, management is a loosely defined title (or set of responsibilities) within most companies. It follows, then,…

Train the Whole Team to Hire Well

Most hiring managers suck at hiring. We could do much better.

Document Processes With Spaghetti Diagrams

Improve work flows with spaghetti diagrams

Don’t Automate Yet.

It’s better to understand and eliminate than automate that which does not need to be automated.

Give Away Information, Build Familiarity

People buy products and services from those they trust. To build trust, you have to build a shared understanding. That shared understanding is easiest to build by giving away information for free. From…

Create a Skunk Team

Excerpt from The Pocket Guide to Making Stuff Better When an organization gets large, it often, by necessity, becomes bogged down by the requirements to keep itself moving. Too much red tape, too…

The Pocket Guide to Writing a Resume

A well written resume is the difference between getting invited in for an interview and never hearing back from the company of your dream. Crushing the resume game is crucial to getting into…

Meditation Benefits for Professionals

Most of us have a certain set of beliefs that we have adopted over time, unconsciously, from our parents, teachers, friends, co workers, roommates, or others we spend time around. We do this…

Seven Deadly Wastes

Taiichi Ohno defined the seven biggest sources of waste as an engineer at Toyota more than 40 years ago. These wastes were responsible be for the majority of issues that arose in the…

An intro to Lean Organizations

The term lean was coined in a 1988 article titled Triumph of the Lean Production System, written by John Krafcik. Lean, being a reference to having no fat, or nothing extra, is a…

Time to Leave the Barbershop

The assumption we tend to make is that bad kids will influence good kids into doing bad things (same goes for adults).

Understand Before Automating

Automation has been all the hype for over a decade now. Millions of jobs are predicted to be automated away thanks to advanced robotics, more capable software, and more computing power becoming available…

Dessert Before Dinner

The looser we are about enforcing our own rules, the more we will see temptation. The more we give into the temptation, the less relevant the rules become. The faster we lose hold…

On Interviewing People

how to be a good manager: part of managing a business is hiring people. Getting good at this is crucial.

On Manifesting the Future

Our past did not lock in our trajectory forever. With conscious effort, we can break the hold of our past. We can decide what get.

On Living with a Dog

Getting a dog has been a great test of patience. It’s also been a great way to force myself into a new routine, get more exercise and learn a new communication standard.

Systems Need Rule Breakers, Pt II

being a good manager or leader requires being able to set ground rules & expectations. It also requires being able to see where the rules are insufficient.