Corporations & Whack-A-Mole
Joseph Heller wrote in his novel, Good as Gold, “The most advanced and penultimate stage of civilization is attained when chaos masquerades as order.” I’m pretty sure we’ve already arrived.
Charles E. Smith has been a senior executive coach and leadership consultant in corporations and government agencies in the United States, Europe, and Canada since 1969. He graduated from the Boston Public Latin School and holds an A.B. from Harvard College, and M.B.A. from Harvard Business School, and a Ph.D. from Case Western Reserve University.
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Life is either a Romantic Adventure or Nothing at All
Last night, my family saw the 1994 movie “Don Juan DeMarco” on Netflix with Johnny Depp and Marlon Brando. It was funny, heartwarming, sensual, intelligent and very well acted. We were transported from our everyday world of people struggling with their desire to get more out of life and work to a place where life…
Is Breakthrough a Dirty Word?
The history of fuel economy standards in the US automobile industry is an excellent example of typical resistance to Breakthrough. It portrays how yesterday’s environmental obstruction is today’s common sense.
Energy Flows Where the Attention Goes
What Performance, Relationship, Innovation and Values have in common is that each is an arena for enhancing, focusing, or suppressing peoples’ energy. It follows that the projects with the most available energy are far more likely to succeed. Good ideas and the force of will are not enough. Consider the following examples. TOO MUCH ATTENTION TO…
Control Supresses Engagement
I know a successful global corporation where the Employee Engagement scores consistently range between 20 to 30 percent, and sometimes reach 40. Whatever new training or policies they institute, Engagement stays stuck. However, one division has Engagement scores in the 90s. No one elsewhere understands, even when it is explained to them. What’s present in the one division that’s…
Take Responsibility for Two Worlds by Charles E. Smith Ph.D.
Six Sigma and other significant development projects too often do not fulfill their promise. In business, the public sector, academic and military sectors, failure and missed expectations plague innovation projects, technology implementations and other programs. In a recent Innovation Conference in Shanghai, a global corporate executive discussed broadly-based research which showed that 90 percent of companies did…
