Leadership Archives

Think Like a Rocket Scientist

I just finished, Think Like a Rocket Scientist by Ozan Varol. He shares the main ingredient for being an original thinker and why being bored is OK.

The best way to be an original thinker is not to conform. To be an imaginative thinker, practice divergent thinking. To be divergent, throw out rational thought. Take an approach where no idea is a bad idea. Then, with your list of innovative ideas, turn back on critical thinking and select your best ideas.

Along with being original, setting aside time for just daydreaming is good. This is in line with another book I recently finished Do Nothing by Celeste Headlee. An example, cited by Varol, is J.K. Rowling in 1990 spending four hours stranded at a train station. She used that time to let her mind wander and came up with Harry Potter, a $1B+ idea.

My Interview on Employee Engagement with Dave Osh of CEOpeek

My thanks to Dave Osh with CEOpeek for discussing employee engagement and create a great place to work.

When an organization has high engagement, employees are giving extra discretionary effort in their jobs, staying, and referring prospective employees and customers. Also, organizations with high engagement are more profitable and have more productive and less absent employees.

We discuss the core parts of engagement, including:

• Alignment with goals
• Teamwork
• Co-worker trust
• Manager effectiveness and trust in senior leaders
• Job satisfaction
• Feeling valued
• Benefits and pay

Throughout the conversation, there are specific, actionable ways for leaders to increase engagement.

The 7 Parts of Job Satisfaction

In my previous post, I shared the spheres of job satisfaction, the above are, in priority order, what makes a job engaging.

The Spheres of Job Satisfaction

For employees to be happy and engaged, there are “spheres” of job satisfaction. Free beer doesn’t matter if your work is mundane and your manager’s a moron. When addressing engagement, start from the inside and work outward

Strategic Planning SWOT

At Intertech, we’ve just completed our annual planning to set our strategies, goals, and projects for the coming year. All planning participants complete an exhaustive survey in advance. Employees not participating in the retreat take part in a half-day working session we call a town hall. They share ideas and provide feedback in a confidential format. We use all this information in a SWOT analysis, which is reviewed, analyzed, and defines next year’s plan. Here’s the SWOT template we use at our retreat.