Articles for category: Initiative

March 20, 2019

Greg Thomas

The Detractors

They aren’t there to help you. They exist to take away value from what you are creating. They come in many forms (too many to list). Really they should be called “Distractors” because their goal is to get under your skin and shift your focus from what you are doing to anything else. Anything that stops you from generating value, breaking down walls and disrupting the norm. They are hard to spot, but we all have them. And the only way to stop them is to keep doing what you’re doing because what you’re doing is the path to change

March 19, 2019

Greg Thomas

Tear Down and Rebuild

If doing it yourself, demo is easy – grab a hammer, make some noise, destroy, destroy, destroy – done. The aftermath of tearing things down, of looking around and seeing what has “become” of things and where to start next is where the real work starts. The key to remember in any Tear Down and Rebuild project or product is that if you only have 8 months to deliver and you spend 6 months tearing down, can you really rebuild in 2 months? Same with leadership, if you want to right the course of your team and spend 8 months

March 18, 2019

Greg Thomas

Where did you go SlideShare?

I used to go to SlideShare all the time to learn about anything. I enjoyed the long-form storytelling that intermixed graphics, presentation and content. It was better than reading a blog because you were able to see the evolution of an idea. I used the past tense because I recently read a number of articles on how the site is dead, it’s user base has dropped and it’s not generating the value it used to. Which is too bad, because there is some incredible content on that site. But one screenshot, taken today, sums up where they are at perfectly.

March 17, 2019

Greg Thomas

Turning the Tide

Changing what a team is working on is easy. Changing what a team is feeling, where they have come from, getting them to unlearn bad habits, rebuilding them, exposing them to new opportunities is not. That’s the tide that you’re up against when you are tasked with implementing change across your team. That’s the work that needs to be done to implement real change. What they are working on, the projects and/or products are meaningless to change. They are effects that will be yielded based on how the changes in the Tide are implemented. This is key because many times,

March 15, 2019

Greg Thomas

I Had an Idea

But did nothing with it. So that’s all it ever remained, was an Idea., Until someone else did it and then it became a product, a story, a book that you had but never executed on. So instead of an idea it became a plan that worked. But as you lament your idea that had a 100% success rate, what you didn’t see, were how many iterations and ideas that person went through to implement your idea. It’s not the idea that was the success, it was all the previous attempts that made it a success.