Yesterday I had to keep an appointment at an office across town. Since I needed to know approximately how long it would take to get there, I logged in to Mapquest. After entering the address of the destination and the origin, it prepared a route map with directions, told me what I would find along...

It’s time to become small minded. Visionaries are big thinkers. Planners may make big plans but they think small. They take the grand scheme of things and turn it into smaller steps. Planners are comprehensive thinkers whose skillset includes the ability to break things up into increments and whose experience has shown them the necessity...

“My plan cannot fail because I have considered every contingency,” so said SPECTRE's expert planner Kronsteen who had devised a plot to steal a Lektor cryptographic device from the Soviets and sell it back to them while exacting revenge on Bond for killing their agent Dr. No. The line comes from the opening sequence in...

What’s the magic word? The guest speaker was seated on the stage, ready to deliver his keynote address. On his right sat the coordinator of the event, the person responsible for pulling all the many strands together to create a worthwhile encounter for speakers and participants alike. On his left sat one of the other...

The expectation that leadership can be a singular role is unrealistic. We wear a lot of hats. We manage, we motivate, we correct, we monitor, we inspire, we facilitate, we coordinate, we focus, we bark, we growl, we whisper, we articulate, we define, and we execute. A couple of posts ago I wrote about our...

I had been hired by the tourism department of a large Native American Tribal government to help them develop a strategic plan. They had a largish budget and had raised the visibility of tribal lands and attractions but there was no rhyme or reason. They engaged public relations firms and bought airtimes and ads on...

  The vision you and/or your company or organization have articulated sets up the target. How you get there is up to those in positions of leadership and management. However, it is not entirely up to you. It requires the agreement, cooperation, and participation of everyone. The vision will not create itself. What is done...

A woodshop in the Caribbean uses a lot of mahogany. Lots and lots of it. In my business, Dunigan Designs, (I sold the business a few years ago but you can check out the website here). Since we made doors, windows, custom furniture, closets, kitchens, and molding, we accumulated a lot of cut-off pieces called...

The first three installments in this series covering management’s most basic principles addresses Planning, Organizing, and Training. Once those have been done, or more realistically, once those are being done, the final principle is that of controlling action. If nothing is moving, the first challenge is to get things moving in an orderly manner. One...