Is chaos like a wild horse?

Inhumane horse trainers (managers) see a rebellious animal who must adjust to a new environment. They transform the horse through a process they call "breaking." They break the will of the horse so it submits to the will of the human. Their methods may include:

• Saddling and riding the horse until its will is broken
• Tying the saddled horse to a tree until it ceases to struggle
• Drowning the horse until it submits
  

How would your management style change if all your employees were financially independent and their objective was to master their craft while contributing to society?

How can you quickly measure the Return on Time Invested (ROTI) by the participants of a meeting? 

When faced with a problem, I suggest considering three strategies:

• Coping
• Managing
• Solving

One week before the application you have been working on is to be delivered, your client asks you to make a small change to a drop down menu. He knows there isn't time to process the change through change management so asks you to bypass it. You try to reason with him that a last minute change is a bad idea. But he insists the change is important to the business and it would mean a lot to him personally. You want to please him so you say yes.

Do you have a pattern of saying yes to requests when you would like to say no? What's the secret to saying no and making it stick?

Managers who like to be in control have a predictable reaction to their organization grappling with a change which creates chaos -- they want it to stop. When? Now, right now.

What happens if management decides to short-circuit chaos with a magical solution? What happens if management accepts chaos as a necessary but uncomfortable period of the change process?

Does management reject your ideas? A typical cause for rejection is a failure to frame the idea effectively. Frame your idea effectively and it becomes a proposal, which will demand consideration by management. What is the recipe and key ingredients for an effective proposal?

Every technology organization must deal with change. Virginia Satir, a pioneering family therapist, created a change model to help families process change. Her model fits high technology organizations equally well. This article explains Satir's model and offers insights into how to more effectively manage the change process.

The people whose opinion counts the most choose to go for faster delivery speed. Their thinking may be sound; in this case, they want to beat their competitors to market.

Choosing faster product delivery visibly sacrifices product quality and, in my experience, it often invisibly sacrifices the economy of product support. In this post, I answer the following questions:

• What is a tradeoff?
• What distinguishes a conscious from an unconscious tradeoff?
• What is the impact of trading off quality for speed?
• What can you do to change the choice?