Business Haiku on Innovation
This is apparently National Poetry Month, so I pressed up this old line-art Square Wheels illustration with its accompanying haiku: I want to set this up with the LEGO, but I thought to… Continue reading
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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
Square Wheels Haiku on Organizational Improvement
It’s been a while since I popped a haiku into the poems blog, so here is one on the issues of leadership and organizational improvement. The wagons roll along like they always have,… Continue reading
Leadership Culture – Some Reality
While there are a lot of places where managers take an active interest in things like organizational improvement, motivation, morale and those kinds of cultural things, there are an awful lot of places… 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
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
Square Wheels Images out of LEGO
My “old” version of the new LEGO illustrations looks like this: and my son pointed out to me that this is NOT all “official LEGO pieces” like the smooth wheel in the middle… Continue reading
HELP! Please compare two different versions of Square Wheels LEGO
My son, whose old LEGO pieces I have been using, suggested that I make the Square Wheels wagon and scenes out of ONLY legitimate LEGO instead of the hybrid assemblies that I have… Continue reading
The Eye sees only what the mind is prepared to comprehend
I saw Henri Bergson’s famous quote in an article on thinking and visioning and thought to illustrate the idea. Originally, he was thinking of this as a metaphor for thinking, but we know… 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
Productivity Problems – Spaghetti and Marshmallows: Seriously
With my continued 40 year focus on issues of people and productivity, I felt it important to share two important developments in the area of food production, since it does affect all of… 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
Communications: What you think you said and what they might have heard
I was wandering around the connected world and came across a most favorite kind of article, one that posted up factoidal information. Gretchen Gavett at HBR shared some interesting charts and data. You… 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
Business Haiku – Innovation through Conversation
Thought that this was a cute little ditty to spin up: Hope that all things go well. More of these to come. For the FUN of It! Dr. Scott Simmerman is a designer of… 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
It’s not the destination, it’s The Journey: A LEGO Square Wheels Poster
One of my friends popped me this quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson that I thought to posterize. So, I took my poster on the theme of ISOLATION and revamped it with the quote.… Continue reading
Teamwork? Why is this called TEAMwork?
Every so often, I am simply struck by what some people call team building. I have written extensively in my other blog about things like go-kart racing, golf, bowling, firewalking and other activities… Continue reading
Motivation, Peer Support and Engagement – A LEGO Poster
My son Jeff had a great idea and simply illustrated it. He was reading one of my earlier blog posts on the workplace and group involvement and gave me the punchline that appears… Continue reading
Greatness and Leadership – Inspiring and Motivating
The basic quote is this one: Good leaders push and drive and move forward, while special ones engage, collaborate and inspire others to greatness. The idea is that doing hard work by oneself… Continue reading
Progress: The Illusion of it
Someone pinned one of my blog posts that had a few optical illusions embedded in it. You can see that here: So, having the master powerpoint file for my Posters open, I thought… Continue reading
Managing: Ants, Lizards and Wasps
Ah, the animal kingdom offers so many examples of the workplace and behavioral choices. And, using those natural scenes, we can often see individuals in motion, building things and implementing change and dealing… Continue reading
Working and The Living Dead
Will work actually make you a Zombie or is that simply your choice for how you do things? Will you just stumble along unmotivated and uncaring about the world around you or will… 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
Innovation: Continuous Continuous Improvement with LEGO and Square Wheels
Someone made a LinkedIn comment about innovation and improvement and I popped in a quip that I thought would be a good poster, so here we go: Continuous continuous improvement is a… 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