This is a fictional response to the open letter to the CEO of Yelp, Jeremy Stoppelman, by Talia Jane about the poor working conditions at Yelp’s Eat24 Customer Service division. She was fired hours after she posted her letter. Subsequently, there has...
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The Ethical Firm is a theoretical, utopian construct that I have created to help us challenge the status quo. I intend to use this construct to explore new ways of thinking about employee engagement and leadership. I hope that this will...
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Gallup reported in its October 2013 State of the Global Workplace that “Only 13% of employees worldwide are engaged at work.” They conclude that 63% are actively disengaged. Digging deeper Tracy Maylett and Paul Warner in their 2014 bookMAGIC: Five Keys to...
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Continuing my mini-series based on Stephen Bungay’s “The Art of Action.” I’ve just reached the point where Bungay is talking about the Center of Gravity (of an opposing army) or the Competitive Advantage (of a market). The point that Bungay (following von Molkte) makes...
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I was introducing myself to a new client the other day, and had been given the great privilege of having unfettered access to their entire employee base of about 50. Developers, Sales, Operations, Marketing, Product and Customer Support were all...
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In “Teamwork is an Individual Skill” Christopher Avery suggests that collective leverage and power does not come from distributing and delegating accountabilities, but from collectively demonstrating responsibility for the entire result, with each member doing their best to make their...
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Agile teams have the sacred goal of delivering value. So perhaps Agile teams be made accountable for the value that they create? This seems reasonable. However, there are problems with this. For one thing, it is very open-ended. How is...
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I’ve just finished reading “Start with Why” by Simon Sinek. As promised it is both fundamental and meaningful. Fundamental in that it’s main conclusion is very similar to “Built to Last” by Jim Collings, that while a company can...
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Governance Principles Planning is everything, the plan is nothing – plans are not commitments, they are useful tools Primary purpose of Governance is transparency – alignment will follow Secondary purpose of Governance is auditability – accountability will follow In calculating...
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June 5th was my first retrospective with the team since being appointed as their Scrum Coach. One of the main challenges that the team had was that as a ‘NICE” team, they had fallen into a culture of group-think and...
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