Past Midway Ramblings on Business & Life

CategoryManagement

Equality at Work

Sometime around 2005 – 2006, I was on a flight from Stockholm to New York. The flight attendant took my ticket at the gate and asked me to step aside and wait without explanation. Seemed odd, but OK. She then took boarding passes from everyone in line while I stood waiting further instructions. When the last person in line passed, the flight attendant turned to me and said the flight was...

Incentives (Gone Wrong)

When I worked at General Electric in the engineering Product Cost Takeout role, management got an idea to incentivize us to save the company as much money as possible. As it was initially presented to us (verbally), the company would pay engineers 10% of the annual savings from our cost-reduction projects as a one-time, year-end bonus. It was early in the year, but I was already lining up about...

Productivity

Do a little bit all the time instead of a lot some of the time.

Consistently making incremental progress is the most effective method to longer-term productivity. I have heard it said that we tend to overestimate what we can accomplish in the short-term and underestimate what we can accomplish in the long-term. True.

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Integrity

One of the great personality traits of my son (Soren) is that he always tells the truth, even to his own detriment at times. Example: We were riding in the van (Soren was 4 years old at the time). I heard some commotion in the back. Then Soren tries to tell on his sister: “Daddy, Svea hit me after I hit her first.” Clearly, he would have benefitted from a slightly shorter sentence. But I like his...

Hiring Up

Always strive to hire people that overwhelmingly impress you. Perhaps they might even intimidate you a bit with how good they are in certain areas. Maybe they are smarter, faster, more experienced, have better leadership skills, relationship skills or are more articulate. Whatever. Hire people that can outperform you. Your team should not admire you. That’s just feeding your ego. You should...

Past Midway Ramblings on Business & Life

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