Being and becoming your best is hard work. Hard doesn’t mean impossible. Rather, it requires commitment, a goal, and most importantly, consistency. I love the way Seth Godin described the difference between persistence and consistency. As he put it, “persistence is annoying.” I see his point. Excellence, improving, getting [...]
I’ve spent a great deal of time lately thinking about creativity, innovation, and the role of art in the workplace. We focus on the strategies, the outcomes, the output of our work. These are all important, but how do we become creative? Where does innovation fit into our work on [...]
My own gardening skills remain a work in progress. But since my days as a classroom teacher of lanky and emotional thirteen-year-olds, I have often considered my job as a “planter of seeds.” Brian Eno compared the process of making music with gardening. Seed planting to be your best... [...]
To reach excellence, start looking at the actions in the organization. Quality? Excellence? World Class? Trite expressions or powerful descriptors that differentiate the ordinary from the extraordinary, good from great? You can walk into an organization or talk to someone for a few minutes and recognize the difference immediately. [...]
What does it mean to be a "systems" thinker? “List everything you see in the room.” So began our study of systems thinking. We listed things, lots of things we saw in the university classroom with only a few references to relationships and people. Each of us shared our [...]
The Form Is the form the process? We had already been in the meeting for an hour talking about the pros and cons of what should be on the travel request form. There were more questions than answers. What should be on the form prior to travel? Who signs [...]
The Wisdom of W. Edwards Deming I first heard about W. Edwards Deming in 1982 during the broadcast of the NBC White Paper, If Japan Can, Why Can’t We? I was a young mother of three, who had not formally studied quality concepts, but I recognized the wisdom in Deming’s [...]
How do you do something better? Stop for a moment and consider the last time you wanted to do something better than you had before. What did you do? If you play tennis, you might have taken lessons or practiced volleying against a backboard. Both of these activities might [...]
What does it mean to be data-driven? The term “data-driven decision making” has become an overused phrase in business and education. What does it really mean? Does data “drive” decisions? One of the fallacies of being “data-driven” is the assumption that it provides the answers or solutions to our [...]
