Take the Time Needed to Change and Improve
It is oft-said that Time changes Things, and maybe there is some truth to that. The notion of entropy says that things eventually reduce themselves. But in the case of real people doing… Continue reading
Category Archive: alignment and goals
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Don’t Just DO Something! Stand There… A Square Wheels Poster
Instead of our usual poem or haiku or quote offering, this post shares one of the Square Wheels Poster Images, something you can download and print. The message is clear, whether it is… Continue reading
A Coaching Haiku around Round Wheels
I’m going to be completing a complete redo of our Coaching Tools toolkit soon, one that embeds a series of our LEGO® Square Wheels® scenes and themes. So, I thought to warm up… Continue reading
Business Haiku on Motivation and Teamwork
The View at the Front of the Wagon is a very different one than The View at the Back of the Wagon. There is that old quote that if you don’t know where… Continue reading
Motivating the Spectator Sheep, or “Things are not always how they appear”
Spectator Sheep express themselves with Naaaaaa’s and Baaaaaa’s when asked about things in the workplace. They are most certainly not involved and engaged and they are often not moving in the same direction… Continue reading
Organizational Alignment, LEGO, Square Wheels and Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine
I thought a crazy title might catch your eye and I guess it did! Organizational Alignment is critical for organizational efficiency and effectiveness, but most organizations are NOT aligned and most people find… Continue reading
Balance in the workplace – a poem
Thought you might like this simple view: Managing people and performance IS a juggling act, and there are always things that can be improved. But there are also number of factors that simply… Continue reading
Business Haiku on Motivation and Employee Engagement
Ah, The Slackers! Let’s put the blame on the people for not being motivated, right? After all, the workplace itself must be motivating since at least one of our people seems motivated every… Continue reading
Success takes care of itself?
There was a Henry Ford quote that clanged with me so I popped it into my Square Wheels powerpoint master file and came up with an image for discussion. So, I got this:… Continue reading
Business Haiku on Strategy Execution
How DO we make progress and execute our strategy initiatives? Well, communications and engagement are certainly key issues. Perspective and the sharing of visions and goals is also necessary. Implementing strategy is a… Continue reading
Poem on making work more fun
Our flagship team building game focuses on the leverage points of having fun playing and solving a problem and on the main issues around collaborating among different teams. So many workplaces can benefit… Continue reading
Birds and Roads, a paradox
I just saw an article in LinkedIn that talked about life being a road with lots of signs and that we should visualize what needs to be achieved and convert that into the… Continue reading
Thoughts on Teamwork and Alignment
I want to keep these thoughts simple, since we tend to make everything more complicated than it needs to be. Occam’s Razor is useful! So much research continues to support the reality that… Continue reading
Zen Koans on Worker Involvement and Engagement
I thought to try to visualize things from the Back of the Wagon and to anchor a few zen-type thoughts as to non-involvement and non-engagement and the reality of workplace motivation. You be… Continue reading
Self-Reflection and Personal Growth
In Gary Loper’s newsletter today, he talked briefly about “The Road to Self-Discovery” and since I have been playing with my Square Wheels images and themes a lot the past two days, since… Continue reading
The Play is The Thing!
I was in the middle of a response in one of my LinkedIn forums and thought to quickly put this together and up. We sometimes take work so deadly seriously, and we get… Continue reading
Innovation, Creativity and People
We like to think of ourselves as rational human beings, making good sense of everything that happens in our environment. The reality is that we are creatures bounded by our imagination and self-deceptions,… Continue reading
Nothing Made Sense – A LEGO Square Wheels Image
A similar quote to this turned up when I was reading Closing Time by Joseph Heller, the author of Catch 22. The latter is one of my favorite books of all time, so… Continue reading
Dr. Seuss might say this about Leadership
I thought this might make a good one-liner on the theme of leading people and improving motivation. Reframe the “care” word to anchor it to the issues of people and performance. Caring is… Continue reading
Motivation for Millenials
New Directions shared some solid stuff on motivation and engagement in an email. I thought I would pop up a really simple post linking their work to my illustration of how things really… Continue reading
Haiku of Business Improvement – Square Wheels
As leaders and motivators of others, we need to continually celebrate success as well as look to the future for contininuous continuous improvement. A feeling of success is a critical factor in the… Continue reading
Agile Workplace Practices – A Reality
We hear that “agile” is the new way for a lot of organizations, with the goal of thinking in less constrained ways and in ways to enable better responsiveness on the part of… Continue reading
Peter Drucker Quote and a LEGO Square Wheels post on Management
I saw this in my image files and realize I had not popped it into anything so, here we go. It was going to appear in a longer blog on thinking about management… Continue reading
Yes, you CAN be a more engaging leader of teams
You do NOT need to be a professional facilitator of teams in order to generate more intrinsic motivation and engagement. All you need to do is involve people in aligning to the vision… Continue reading
Behaving Engaging – a LEGO Square Wheels Poster
A discussion group in LinkedIn had a post today about “GO” being the first thing that someone should do as a new manager. DO SOMETHING seemed to be the main thrust. I wrote… Continue reading
LEGO Square Wheels of Continuous Improvement: Hey, Boss!
It has always been my belief that the best ideas for improvement always come from the people who are doing the job and have a hands-on reality of how things work and what… Continue reading
Story of Courage, Leadership and Teamwork
I packaged up a slideshare program telling the story of Susan, a wagon pusher, and her courage in suggesting that her wagon-pulling boss take a different look at how things are working, with… Continue reading
Trust and Isolation – Not Building Teams
There are often issues of isolation in how things work in most organizations. Wagon pullers are naturally isolated from the hands-on reality of the wagon pushers, but some are also simply too distant… Continue reading
Strategy – Connecting The Vision with The Reality
Disconnects are just so common when it comes to people and performance. And when it comes to implementing strategy, the research says that few initiatives meet the goals and expectations of the senior… Continue reading
Workplace Alignment – Good and Better: A Business Haiku
We talk alignment a good bit, but it is certainly possible to take teamwork and collaboration and add SO much structure that we squeeze deviation and creativity out of the equation. Here is… Continue reading
Alignment – Excess Control gives Lackluster Innovation
Here is another simple concept about alignment an over-control, illustrated with my little people: We need people breaking outside the boundaries to discover and implement different ideas, some of which will lead to… Continue reading
Alignment – Too Much is Constraining
There are tons of articles on the issues of culture and alignment of values and goals and the issues around performance and innovation. Alignment is good, but like being too detail-oriented, too much… Continue reading
Square Wheels: Communications is Key (LEGO version)
Here is a simple thought about People and Performance. I do NOT see the workplace as all that difficult to change I do NOT see the workplace needing all that leadership complexity that… Continue reading
Going Lean and Mean = Going Gaunt and Dead?
I continue to be amazed at how we continue to make cuts while expecting improvement. Personally, I feel that the supervisors in most organizations are so overloaded with tasks and responsibilities that they… Continue reading
Chaos, Teamwork and Structure – Issues of Alignment
Let me illustrate my thinking on issues of corporate performance, innovation, teamwork and the basic issue of alignment, since I think that some people get this wrong. Let me take a really simple… Continue reading
Lego People talk for Engagement and Teamwork
My new associate, Hakan Forss, has been designing LEGO® scenarios and now a few other people seem to be jumping into the mix. He and I have been talking since he first published… Continue reading
Involve and Engage and Motivate and Improve
Just back from ASTD and meeting with colleagues who use my team building games and other products, my thoughts on involvement and engagement being done by supervisors received lots of support. But the… Continue reading
A Slideshare package on Lost Dutchman’s Gold Mine for teambuilding
Apologies for this miss-aligned and non-poetic post but I wanted to share the information that a new slideshare program on our team building game for collaboration and alignment was uploaded a few minutes… Continue reading
Herding Cats and Frogs and similar organizational issues
A conversation with a new consultant facilitator friend in the UK had him talking about “Herding Frogs” and I mentioned that old EDS commercial about Herding Cats as useful for talking about trying… Continue reading
Thought on Business: Teamwork – How things really work (Leaders)
My last blog quote post of today — this is number 5. We talk leadership all the time and there are thousands or tens of thousands of books about the issue. SO much… Continue reading
Thought on Business – Thinking Like a Leader of Teamwork
I just read the start of a discussion in one of my LinkedIn groups called, “Think Like a Leader” and which references an HBR video by Daniel Goleman, who I really like and… Continue reading
Square Wheels Poem on Performance – Nothing is NOT
Hope you like this little ditty. Hats off to the Cat in the Hat guy… The Square Wheels theme is one of possibilities, but if nothing changes, nothing improves. So, the situation rhymes… Continue reading
Don’t Just DO Something, Stand There! An illustration
A business tip on an idea for helping an organization make improvements in how things really work: Stop pushing and pulling the wagon and talk about ideas for improvement. And Have FUN… Continue reading
Spectator Sheep – Thoughts on Improving Productivity and Engagement
Here is another thought on Spectator Sheep and an addendum: Understand that Spectator Sheep may not appear as they really are: Yeah, they can choose to be involved if they choose. But often… Continue reading
Square Wheels are everyday tools for engagement and performance improvement
One of the things that becomes more and more apparent is that the metaphor of “Square Wheels” can be everyday language of performance improvement. Things that are “Square Wheels” are simply the things… Continue reading
The Moose Joke – The best session closing story of Scott Simmerman
This is not a poem or a quip but it is the best closing storyline out there for a workshop. I say this after attending a whole big bunch of sessions for training… Continue reading
More Better Faster: Square Wheels, Round Wheels and Intrinsic Motivation
We roll forward. Thumping and bumping. But then, things stop and we all gather to share issues and ideas and thoughts about what we might do differently. The result is that we choose… Continue reading
Business Haiku with Square Wheels – The Journey Forward
Making progress in any initiative is taking steps forward. Often, it is about working with others and being led on the journey. One often needs peer support, good systems and processes to manage… Continue reading
Business Haiku – Two cartoons on teamwork
Teams and teamwork and team building. A pretty funny thing that seems so simple but that involves so many bits and pieces. Teams want to form naturally. Put a group of four or… Continue reading
In The Beginning – A Classic on Missions and Visions
At least 25 years ago, I came across this. Never did see a source. But it is an obvious classic insofar as how it describes how things really work in large organizations. I… Continue reading