Wisdom Journal

By William Seidman I went to The Conference Board’s Annual Meeting in NYC last week for a conference on Leadership Development. A big theme was the role of demographics in leadership. It’s inevitable that many boomers will begin retiring soon, creating a gap in leadership. The next group to lead? Th

By William Seidman The Conference Board is a venerable and vital international organization, founded in 1916 to serve business. It’s hard to fathom that something begun 94 years ago could still be important today. It is. Headquarters are in NYC and there are offices in Singapore, Brussels, Hong Kong

By William Seidman Why do companies keep making the same mistakes with IT projects? A colleague has been asked to help deploy a new financial management system, which is meant to replace several legacy systems. His client has set an aggressive deadline and hired a lot of resources from the vendor. T

By William Seidman We make it a point not to miss ISPI’s annual THE Performance Improvement Conference. This year’s, held in April in Toronto, did not disappoint. Rick Grbavac, Cerebyte VP, presented on one of our favorite topics. “Achieving Unimaginable Performance: New Science for Affirmative Lead

By William Seidman I’m continuously on the lookout for better ways to help teams do better. Language can make all the difference. For example, “management” versus “leadership.” In our work with performance improvements associated with strategic initiatives, team work, particularly teams led by execu

By William Seidman We’ve been working with three organizations that developed great best practices from their positive deviants. Two of the programs succeeded and one failed spectacularly.   When positive deviants build best practices there is a richness of language and concept that is visible and p

By William Seidman Simon Sinek gave an energetic and thought-provoking TED talk a while back on the importance of Why. The work I do with positive deviants strongly supports the importance of a compelling purpose (the why) as a primary motivator of all people. “Whys” that are about creating an impor

By William Seidman In our 15 years of work on performance improvements with global teams in multi-national organizations, we’ve found that three elements make a huge difference to success. Alignment on purpose. Teams that take the time to really discuss and align on the greater social good they are

By William Seidman We work with organizations to develop better first line managers:   sales team leaders managers in public utilities production line supervisors  consulting engagement leads  These are all programs in which a manager is responsible for the performance of a group.  How tough is the

By William Seidman We love it when we can help good organizations utilize their positive deviants – their best performers – to develop fresh best practices. Inevitably the new program is exciting and inspirational to prospective users. What’s frustrating is to then to watch someone higher in the org