High marks for the automaker’s crisis management Late last month, General Motors sparked comparisons to Toyota’s recent troubles when it announced that small electrical fires had occurred in some Chevy Volts during the course of testing. Unlike Toyota, however, GM quickly got out in front of the story, as described in this quote from an …

About a year ago I ran across a NEWSWEEK article that still moves me on the subject of creativity and why we are losing our grip on it. “Oh, it’s part of the usual cutting of arts and music programs in schools” and “creativity is regarded as the purview of the arts” and no one …

How often does this very notion go on in your organizations? When was the last time you tried to sell your employees on some magic? Surely you can think of time when you spun the message to sound more positive or left out some details in a communication. Eventually like the kids, they will figure it out. However, unlike the kids, they can leave. Or they can stay and offer just a little more effort and put in a little less time.

The field of personal and professional coaching has grown rapidly in the past 15 years and, as with most fields and professions that experience this kind of growth, there are many different perspectives on coaching. Here’s a definition that perhaps most people would agree with. Coaching involves working in a partnership between coach and client(s) …

This is a stretch, I know. Their wasn’t somebody with an X that I’ve studied. So this is a book that I enjoyed and it has an X in the title. Kurt Mortensen wrote the book Maximum Influence: The 12 Universal Laws of Power Persuasion. For us to have maximum influence in our lives, including …

Design Thinking is qualitatively different from other thinking styles. Regardless of how you use Design Thinking it communicates in unique ways, weaving together visual, verbal, and kinesthetic knowing. In this way thoughts, ideas, imaginings, AND planning, product concepts, and even goals become NeuroIntegrated® – inviting the whole human system (body, brain, mind, language) into the …

A Simple Grant Proposal is Better…. When your grant proposal is being evaluated by a government agency, reviewers rely on a mental toolbox of rapid and simple techniques to score your application. How you write/design the proposal must be as persuasive as possible, and must help reviewers gather information quickly and effortlessly. Use the principles …

How do you get information to document when there is resistance? One of the many reasons comes from not understanding the importance of documentation. There are also those who are not used to having documentation. They were trained by others so why waste time to put it down on paper? They do not understand the …

As you can tell from the title, this is Part II of my previous blog on the subject. In our search or finding good employees for qualified people, we need to look beyond the direct hiring application and see if there are other qualities or experiences that a new person might bring to the company …

Especially for boards in change projects for small- to medium-sized corporations, the Board can be the leverage point – the point in the project that can make the biggest difference – for success in significant projects for change. In these situations, if an organization seems reluctant to involve the Board, then change agents should seriously …