Are you really going to finish that book you started reading? I know it sounded interesting when you started, and I know you want to learn more. After a week of reading though, you’re only 5% through. How do people speed through books in a day or two? It’s nuts. At this rate, you’ll never …
Learning for Growth: Ditching Books on Your Personal Journey Read More »
How many of us set an exceptionally high bar for ourselves, and even when we reach it, we feel like it’s not enough? We’ve climbed the corporate ladder and are now leading others, but the rungs we haven’t yet reached are the ones that really have our attention. We focus on relationships. Still, we work …
Leading with Doubt: A Tool for the Insecure Overachiever Read More »
“You should be more proactive and less reactive.” How many times have you been given this feedback? I have many times, and I find it mostly confusing. Hindsight is 20/20 so it’s easy to offer up when looking at the past, but I can’t prepare for every contingency. And I can’t see the future so …
A Thoughtful Rejection of Proactive Versus Reactive Read More »
We’ve all been there. We show up to the sprint review, and a team is showing off technical specs, slides, or perhaps sharing their code. Rarely do they demo the increment they’ve created. And maybe they’re also not inviting anyone outside the team to be part of the conversation. As their coach, we want to …
Revamp Your Sprint Review: 3 Essential Questions for Success Read More »
Let’s talk about Shu Ha Ri. For any unfamiliar, it’s a term borrowed from martial arts, and it’s meant to describe the stages of learning to achieve mastery. First, we must learn and apply the rules without deviation (Shu). As we progress, we break the rules or perhaps innovate on the rules to improve ourselves …
A few weeks ago, I wrote about how the Marine Corps decentralizes decision making via the Rule of Three. I talked a lot about how information moves down the chain of command to those in the trenches, and a few readers reminded me that I glossed over the flow of information from the trenches to …
I have a confession to make … I’m forgetful. Incredibly forgetful, in fact, and it’s a real problem for me. Still, the people I work with are astounded that nothing ever falls between the cracks. It’s my task list that’s doing the heavy lifting though, and I’m almost religious about it. My whole day is …
Let me tell you a secret about a simple mechanism that the U.S. Marine Corps employs to decentralize decision making. The brilliance of it is in its simplicity, and I do believe it’s mostly a secret. Only once in all my years have I run across anyone who has described what I’m about to describe …
How the Marine Corps Decentralizes Decision Making Read More »
Frequent readers of my blog know that I’m a U.S. Marine Corps veteran. My ten years as a Marine were some of the most formative years of my life, and every today I still rely on what the Corps taught me about a bias toward progress. Marines aren’t known for their nuance, but we know …
I was catching up with Chris Murman* and from nowhere he said something that’s stuck with me. He said this more kindly than I’m summing up here, but this is what I took away: Change fatigue is what someone says when they don’t want to do something. It caught me off guard, and the more …
