What Organizational Culture Actually Is
Culture is the set of behaviours an organization rewards, tolerates, and repeats until they require no thought. Everybody inside knows exactly how far it sits from…
Read →Idaho leadership
Leadership Lessons
Practical leadership lessons from experienced Idahoans across the state's industries, institutions, and communities — guidance you can apply in your own work.
Knowing When to Close Something
Closing well is an act of stewardship, and it is available only while there are still resources to do it with. An organization that continues until…
Read →The Honest Assessment
Telling a board that the organization may not be viable is the hardest thing a leader does, and delaying it removes the options that would have…
Read →Cutting Well
One round, deep enough, with the reasoning stated. The slow bleed feels humane and destroys the organization, because a second round teaches everybody capable of leaving…
Read →The Turnaround Sequence
Stabilise, diagnose, cut, rebuild. The order is not a preference. Each stage depends on something the previous one produces, and reversing any two is how recoverable…
Read →Recognising Decline
The financial indicators arrive last. Everything that would have told you earlier is qualitative, available for years beforehand, and reported to nobody.
Read →The Change Sequence Plan
One page: order, owners, checkpoints, and the conditions under which you stop. Written before the announcement, because the reversal criteria have to be set by somebody…
Read →Making It Stick
A change survives only once it is encoded into hiring, promotion, budget, and calendar. Until then it depends on the leader's continued attention, and that attention…
Read →Communicating Change Over Months
The launch reaches almost nobody. What carries a change is a cadence of small, unremarkable references sustained past the point where the leader has become bored…
Read →Who Must Be Persuaded First
A small number of people function as evidence for everybody else. Identifying them is a matter of who is watched rather than who holds a title,…
Read →