Infinite Web Design

You’re a large organization with divisions and departments and teams. You have vice presidents and managers and team leaders. You have a web team that manages your massive public web site. They have designers and developers and a manager. So, I ask you, who should decide what content goes on the website? Do you let anyone send content to the web team for posting. Does the vice president from Marketing call the shots? How about the manager from customer relations? Or the team leader from product development? Perhaps the manager of the web team? What is the right answer? Who should be the gatekeeper for the website? Should you even have one?

The answer is not so simple. If you put one person in charge and choose wrong you could end up with a jerk with a God complex running everything, crushing good ideas and suffering from a major case of Not-Invented-Here syndrome related to any ideas they didn’t come up with. On the other hand the right person can supply a unifying vision, provide a firm hand to keep the website from becoming confusing and cluttered or a political battleground for company infighting. But how can you pick the right person? We can learn from America’s Founding Fathers on this one and create a division of powers with checks and balances to keep people from getting power crazy.
Continue reading American History 101

Job Descriptions can be useful tools during the hiring process. They help employers specify their needs and they help potential employees identify positions that they are qualified for. Without a clear description of the skills needed to do a job and the responsibilities associated with that job it would be nearly impossible to hire a qualified accountant, engineer, programmer, or sales associate. So what could possibly be bad about a Job Description?

Job Descriptions limit people. They place barriers on the potential aspirations and actions an employee may take. Job Descriptions play a crucial role in the “not my job” syndrome, where employees don’t really care what happens around them as long as they don’t get blamed. Employers are often at fault for this when they push employees to be so focused on their assigned tasks and following their instructions that the employees feel the only path to success is blind obedience and adherence to existing protocols.
Continue reading Are Job Descriptions Bad For Business?

Discomfort can be a sign that something is wrong and action is required to fix it. Such is the case when one sits on a porcupine, leans on a hot stove, or accidentally walks in on stranger in the shower. However, there are times when being uncomfortable is a sign that you are finally moving in the right direction. When an individual or organization has grown comfortable and complacent and no longer pushes their boundaries in an effort to improve a little discomfort may be a good thing.
Continue reading When Uncomfortable is Good

Balance is key to many (though not all) areas of life. Today we’re going to explore the need to find a healthy balance between analysis and action. Spending too much time and effort on either will lead to stagnation and failure. If all of your time is spent figuring out a better way to do things you’ll never actually get things done and if all of your effort goes toward action you will fail to improve and adapt how you do them.
Continue reading Analysis Paralysis

Inertia makes it difficult for large objects in motion to change direction. Large organizations suffer from an institutional inertia that makes it difficult for them to adapt and conduct business in new ways. This can apply to the way mail is delivered, phones are answered, files are stored, supplies are purchased, and a multitude of other areas large and small.

Change is hard, changing how hundreds or thousands of people do their jobs is very hard. People are uncomfortable changing how they work. They may not like everything they are doing or understand it, but at least it is familiar and they know what to do at each step. People are often afraid of making mistakes and losing their jobs. So while the head of the company talks about being on the “cutting edge” and “leading the industry” the workers in the trenches are fearfully looking at the cutting edge and worrying that they are the ones about to get cut.
Continue reading Pondering the Ponderous

Over time every individual and group will develop patterns of behavior that they repeat regularly while they work. These patterns can be formalized as documented business processes or left undocumented, but gradually they will solidify and become patterns of behavior that are difficult to break out of. Sometimes these patterns will represent extremely efficient ways of accomplishing a task, but often they were developed ad hoc as needed and we encounter a phenomenon called Sub-Global Optimization.
Continue reading Optimizing Processes Globally