Impressions and Customer Service
I am trying to find a new vendor and it has been wild as the franchisees of this organization continue to fail to respond to me in a way so that I would… Continue reading
Category Archive: motivation
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Business Haiku: On Leading People, a Square Wheels thought of the day
Leadership. Much of it is about involving and engaging people in workplace improvement, which impacts performance, makes people feel appreciated if their ideas contribute to things, and which is motivating. But organizations can… Continue reading
Happy Thanksgiving – a poem about US in the workplace
I thought you might like this poem using my US / THEM theme and a focus on change and improvement. By clicking on this image, you will go to my slideshare site where… Continue reading
Learning and Change
Learning. You have a choice and you cannot simply depend on others to control your destiny or your progress forward. Consider: Ya think? You can always vote with your feet if they simply… 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
Dr. Seuss-style Poem on Engagement and Motivation
There are about 5 different threads that got me to the point of posting this. But the end result of the refocused energy was actually pretty good, I think: Here is the Dr.… Continue reading
Simple Thought on Team Perspective
Teams are powerful tools for implementing changes and improving workplace performance. Teams also impact leadership and can work for you or against you, depending on the organizational culture. Sometimes, it pays to simply… 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
Managing and Leading Change
For the past 20 years, I have been playing with the theme of managing and leading change. One reality is that you cannot push change onto someone else. In that way, it is… Continue reading
Persistence – Not Enough by Itself
My friend Kevin Eikenberry tweeted today that, “Persistence matters for matters of personal achievement and leadership.” Since I had just posted a picture blog of Perfectionism in this poems and quips blog, I… Continue reading
Perfectionism: Some Square Wheels Thinking
An acquaintance shared that she will be presenting on TV about “perfectionism.” It is actually something I know very little about, even though a lot of people seem to think that I am… Continue reading
Innovation – How does it get started?
I am a big believer in continuous continuous improvement and workplace innovation driven by people who have their hands on the wagon and know what is not working smoothly. Innovation does not always… Continue reading
Creating Support for Change
We often find that change is resisted. I’ve written extensively on this in my regular blog posts, like this one on “The Reality of Change, Innovation and Employee Engagement,” and this one on… Continue reading
A Desk is a Dangerous Place
I got some new brown LEGO pieces, so I had to mess with the wagon and make it bigger. Then, I stored on some additional wheels, with the same three wagon pushers and… 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
Zen Koan on Workplace Engagement and Leadership
I just thought that this might anchor to some thoughts about behavioral alternatives and leadership and engagement and some workplace issues like motivation and innovation. Ya think? (grin) My belief and my experience… Continue reading
Square Wheels Haiku on The Passion for Change
The people at the back of the wagon might seem resistant to any imposed changes that management — the wagon pullers — might suggest. But plenty of research has found a large difference… Continue reading
Poem on Teamwork (and Politics)
Thought you might like this poem on teamwork and organizational behavior as it meshes up with the idea that our wagons are often bogged down in the mud of reality and politics: We… Continue reading
Square Wheels Dr. Seuss-style Poem on Being Bold
I love those Dr. Seuss kinds of rhyming so I thought to lay out one that focuses on continuous improvement, change and innovation and on the issues of personality. To generate change, you… Continue reading
A Square Wheels Working Reality and the ending “dous”
When I came across the interesting thing about English words and the –dous ending, I immediately thought of the illustration of how things really work in so many organizations. Thought you might like… Continue reading
Moron National Employee UN-Appreciation Day
My cynicism continues this morning as I read more about the dis-connection of so many workers as I write on my developing toolkits of Roadblock Management and of Facilitation for Workplace improvement. They… Continue reading
Engagement and Motivation – a Management Competency Checklist
After posting up a blog about the irony of actually celebrating a single day called National Employee Appreciation Day — think about that or check out my blog post — I was thinking… Continue reading
Managing Roadblocks: Dis-Un-Engagement
More to come on this shortly, but I have started rebuilding an old toolkit on Managing Roadblocks and will start using Susan and the LEGO to model the concept and the opportunities. Basically,… Continue reading
Listening? Awareness of its impacts is awakening
My friend Gary Loper shared the fact that we are fast approaching International Listening Month, which is March. Gary is going to be hosting a chat on the subject here and I thought… 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
Mistakes and Innovation – Impact of Learning
Recent talk in a LinkedIn Leadership Group got me thinking about how we deal with mistakes in the workplace. Some managers do it well and some do it badly, generating what the literature… Continue reading
The REALITY of Innovation and Improvement
My belief is that innovation and improvement are incremental processes that generally occur in small, sometimes continuous steps forward. There may be occasional mistakes or failures but teams of people can often implement… Continue reading
Continuous Continuous Improvement – Reality
In a LinkedIn thread, the issue of organizational improvement was raised and I commented about the reality that continuous improvement was something that many managers strive to achieve, once! Too many people simply… 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
Destiny, Teamwork, and Making Sense of Things
I was thinking about teamwork and how it tends to integrate with company culture while I was looking at some old powerpoint slides of quotes. I thought to polish up this one and… Continue reading
Workplace Happiness – The World
My friends in Hong Kong at CSG just sent me some research reports from their membership with the WIN / Gallup International global research network that I thought to pass along. I see… Continue reading
We LAUGH at Square Wheels. Levitation!
Why not simply laugh at the antics of those people pushing and pulling a wagon on Square Wheels? It is simply so silly! What do you think they do things that way? If… 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
A Quote on Acting, Dreaming, Planning, and Believing
This quote by Anatole France was shared on Twitter, so I thought to illustrate it with my Square Wheels One LEGO approach to how things really work. Your thoughts? It reminds me of… Continue reading
Making Improvements in how things work
We tend to approach the workplace as a highly complicated interrelationship of hundreds of twisted systems, policies, procedures and programs. Just the thought of “how to motivate people” will make some managers cringe… Continue reading
Thinking: Beliefs versus Actual Creativity
Most of us are creative and innovative when it comes to solving problems, we really are. But it would also appear that most of us go through a phase where we lose that… Continue reading
Moron Teambuilding: A Great Video
I popped onto my pal Michael Cardus’ blog and found this animated 2-minute video that is about teambuilding. For me, it hit a lot of the “high” notes about what is wrong with… 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 on TeamBuilding and Teamwork and working together
Teams can form up quickly, but a team may be only a team and not part of any larger team, which is why interdepartmental collaboration is an organizational oxymoron. A cartoon haiku for… Continue reading
I’m Thinking Thoughts on Motivation and Improvement
Thinking. A good idea for most managers. Perspective. A good thing for most managers. Engagement. A good process for most employees. Improvement. A good accomplishment for most organizations. Implementation. A difficult task for… Continue reading
Santa, Square Wheels, LEGO and Issues of People and Performance
I got the Santa Creator Set from LEGO and started messing around with my Square Wheels representation of how things really work in most organizations. After all, should Santa’s be expected to operate… 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
What Leaders DO – expressed in Square Wheels and LEGO
We often discuss themes of leadership, and there are just so many complicated models and detailed books that go after the explanation of what the best leaders do differently than the average ones… Continue reading
The Boss, Thinking and Missing; A Dr. Seuss style poem
Thought you might like this little glimpse of organizational reality, but here is my LEGO version of how things really work in most organizations along with a Dr. Seuss-style poem of the commonplace… Continue reading
Dr. Seuss-Style Thanksgiving Poem on Thinking and Being Great
Well, when one gets into the grove of messing around with poems, one actually starts messing around with poems. I’ve always liked that Dr. Seuss style of saying things so there is a… Continue reading
A Poem on Thanksgiving Communications and Success
All of us can look back over the year and see successes and we can all look forward to see opportunities to work together and generate new and improved results. Innovation often takes… Continue reading
Mechanistic Operations: What’s wrong with THAT picture?
I am re-reading Gareth Morgan’s book on Images of Organizations (1986) and some of his writings on the mechanistic approaches to organizational design got me to think about how things work using my… Continue reading