Implementing accountability: lessons from Brazil

We facilitated a strategic planning meeting in southern Brazil. While there, we had the opportunity to visit IguaçuFalls, one of the great sites on the World Heritage List. IguaçuFalls has a flow capacity equal to three times that of Niagara … Continue reading

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“Plans are nothing… Planning is everything.”

“Plans are nothing… Planning is everything.” Dwight D. Eisenhower Maria Birkhead, Senior Facilitator at Myrna Associates, discussed this famous quote with a client’s executive team during a recent review meeting. She noted that Eisenhower’s quote is an amazing statement, coming … Continue reading

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Commit, explode, recover – a winning strategy

Bill Walsh, who coached the San Francisco 49ers to three Super Bowl championships, had a simple strategy for winning. He felt that his football team needed to follow a cycle of “commit, explode, recover.” To win in football or in … Continue reading

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Perhaps it is time to declare a crisis

When there is a major problem, what signals do your actions send to your employees? What do you do when things are going dramatically worse than planned?  Merely hoping that things will get better is pretty risky.  Many of our … Continue reading

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The next big thing could be in front of your face

My wife Mary and I love seasoning our food with black pepper. When I was growing up, I concluded that my mother considered black pepper an exotic spice, since I never saw her use it. We always had salt and … Continue reading

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Never try to teach a pig to sing

Software development teams never seem to make a release deadline. Things always seem to take longer. They will report that they would be ready to ship March 2nd, but if you showed up that day with bottles of celebratory champagne, … Continue reading

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“If only they had asked me”–how sad.

We were sitting in a doctor’s brand new office. The Physician’s Assistant came in and was quite grumpy. “The examination table is placed wrong relative to the window. The sink and power plugs are all in the wrong places. And … Continue reading

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Do your employees know what they are being paid for?

Many years ago I sat down with one of my employees and asked why he hadn’t made progress on his assignment. “I haven’t had the time to work on it,” he told me. I asked him what he had been … Continue reading

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Small teams + tighter communications = better productivity

For over twenty years I had a love affair with APL, the world’s most productive computer programming language. APL is elegant, concise, and powerful. When embedded in the most responsive IBM mainframe timesharing system of the era, it enabled our … Continue reading

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Are we there yet? When will it be finished?

Here is a trick question. Assume someone is working on developing a program that will take 100 hours to finish. If they are able to devote two hours a week to the project, how long will it take to finish? … Continue reading

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