Holly G. Green

All posts by Holly G. Green

Are You Playing to Win?

Your #1 job as a leader is to create a compelling vision of winning, then keep yourself and everyone else in the organization focused on it with laser-like intensity. Are you focused on winning and moving towards it each day, celebrating milestones along the way? Or do you play to not lose? When an organization lacks a clear destination, it usually has many ill-defined ones. Employees feel unmotivated and uncommitted. Time, talent, and resources get wasted on products and projects that go nowhere. And people end up working on their own personal agendas rather than doing what’s best for the…

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Are You in the Innovation Danger Zone?

innovative products

Ever wonder why some companies seem to effortlessly come out with one great innovation after another while others struggle to get even one new product or service out the door? There’s a reason for it. Innovation is a complex process that involves a lot more than just throwing money at an R&D department and hoping for results. Specifically, it requires certain ways of thinking and behaving that open people up to considering possibilities and prevent them from getting stuck in the past. Companies that innovate on a regular basis practice these behaviors on a regular basis. Companies that struggle to…

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Everything You Wanted to Know About Christmas (but were afraid to Google)

merry_christmas

Did you know that Christmas — this country’s most cherished Christian holiday — has its roots in pagan festivals such as Saturnalia, the Kalends (a precursor to the 12 days of Christmas), and Deus Sol Invictus (birthday of the unconquerable sun)? According to historians, in ancient times these celebrations all took place around this time of year. When the Christian church came along, it strongly disapproved of such celebrations, and co-opted the pagans by declaring December 25 as Christ’s birthday – even though there is no evidence that Christ was born on that day. In A.D. 350, Pope Julius I…

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Know When to Manage and When to Coach

management

Have you ever wondered why the head of a baseball team is called the manager and the head of a basketball team is called the coach? (These are the kinds of things I sometimes ponder on long airplane rides.) The answer has to do not just with the obvious differences between the two sports, but also with how the players are coached and managed during the games. Just as baseball and basketball are two very different sports, coaching and managing are two very different activities. One has to do with directing, the other has to do with teaching. Managing is…

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The Dangers of Sensory Overload

sensory overload

Call me an old fogey, but the fact is we live in a very over-stimulated world. The real issue is not so much that we’re constantly in sensory overload. It’s that we’ve become desensitized to most of the stimuli bombarding our senses. This automatic tuning out of sensory input enables us to cope in today’s information overloaded world. But it does not serve us well at work.

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Four Strategies for Getting It Done in Your Organization

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Getting the right things done involves a systematic process of rigorously discussing “hows and whats,” questioning, tenaciously following through, and ensuring accountability. It requires making assumptions about the business environment, assessing the organization’s capabilities, linking strategy to operations and the people who will implement that strategy, and then linking rewards to performance and results.

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The Human Brain: Friend or Foe?

brain friend or foe

The human brain is a remarkable organ, yet at times it can be our worst enemy. It comes equipped with remarkable cognitive, reasoning, and creative powers. But it also has many built-in patterns of thinking and perceiving that do not always serve us well. Two of the worst offenders are the tendency to see what we want to see and to screen out data that contradicts our prevailing view of the world.

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Got Flash Foresight?

flash foresight

“Flash Foresight: How to See the Invisible and Do the Impossible,” by Daniel Burrus, redefines what is possible in the business world. I was so impressed after reading it that I sent Burrus an email telling him how much I enjoyed it and would enjoy chatting with him face to face. We met for a great glass of wine and had an interesting time discussing the book. Turns out we share many ideas on how business leaders can cope with today’s hyper-paced markets and high levels of uncertainty (Is it any wonder I thought he was brilliant?!)

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Five Tips for Converging on Great Ideas

ideas

Last week I talked about the first phase of the creative process (divergence), which consists of stimulating new thinking by diversifying and exploring. The second phase in the process is convergence, which involves refining and choosing the best possibilities from the ideas generated during the divergence phase. In today’s global economy, market opportunities abound. For most companies, the problem is not coming up with enough good ideas. It’s deciding which ones to follow through on. Convergence tools help to make sense of what often seems like an overwhelming number of possibilities. They enable you to narrow the range of choices…

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Stop Confabulating!

Dictionary

“We know what our employees really want or need without asking. Our customer relationships are in great shape. That‘s the way everyone in our industry does it, so why should we do it differently? We don’t need to slow down to plan or communicate; everyone here knows what to do. Sure it’s happening elsewhere, but technology won’t disrupt our industry.”

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Need Some New Ideas? Consult your SWAMI!

new ideas

Creativity can sometimes seem like magic, but anyone can enhance their creative abilities simply by understanding the underlying principles and grasping one very important rule. Creativity consists of two distinct phases — divergence and convergence. Divergence is the stimulation of new thinking by diversifying and exploring. Convergence refines and chooses the best possibilities from the ideas generated by divergence. Divergence is an expansive process, with the idea being to stretch the mind in order to come up with new ideas.

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The Importance of 5 Types of Thinking

critical thinking

Most of all, strategic leaders know how to strike a balance between visualizing what might or could be and an effective day-to-day approach to implementation. They can look into the future to see where the company needs to go and what it will look like once they get there. And they can do this while making sure the right things get done on a daily basis.

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Redefining Excellence for Today’s World

leadership excellence

Excellence starts with getting very clear on the end state you wish to achieve (winning) and relentlessly driving towards it every day. Excellence requires knowing when to push on (even when you don’t have all the information or the perfect solution), but doing it well and constantly refining as you forge ahead. Excellence means accepting only the best, and understanding that when it is not given, that you, as the leader, are at least partly responsible.

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Five Proven Ways to Undermine Excellence in Your Organization

success

Almost one of out every two employees does not know what management expects from them in terms of job performance, which means that management isn’t telling them what is expected. Management expects employees to be mind readers or they don’t care about performance. And we wonder why excellence is such a rare commodity in the corporate world! As leaders, the things we don’t do or say often have more of an impact than those that we do. So, I took my own informal poll and came up with the top five things managers don’t do that undermine excellence in organizations.

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Pre-thinking: Stretching Your Brain

stretching-the-brain

How would you respond if a new technology made your current business model obsolete overnight? What if a computer hacker broke through your security system and stole or compromised all your customer data? As business leaders, we don’t generally like to think about these kinds of worst-case scenarios.

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