A post by Guy Kawasaki reminded me of another unintended consequence of using the wrong measures (see the Unintended Consequences post from 5/15). Actually, Guy was commenting on a video of Malcolm Gladwell (The Tipping Point) discussing the pits falls of today's hiring practices.   Using the wrong criteria in your selection process could lead to disastrous results.  With today's technology, we are in data overload. For many, many things, we can have so much data available [...]

Setting SMART Goals and Clear Expectations are an essential part of the process of achieving higher levels of accountability with your peers and employees. Goals must be determined before expectations can be set and Expectations have to be set before someone can be held accountable for meeting them. Often we use the terms Goals and Expectations interchangeably. This happens most often when expectations are implied during the goal setting process. For example, when setting the goal to reduce e [...]

In this article, we will be focusing on the initial steps to begin changing the behaviors that lead to a higher level of accountability. For this article, we will assume that you are the official leader of this group; i.e. you are the boss. Being the boss makes it much easier to drive behavior changes but that does not mean that you cannot do it if you are not the boss. It just takes longer and you must think more strategically. We will cover tips for the non-boss later on in this series. We [...]

This idea was inspired by recent diving and snorkeling trips members of our team have taken in the Florida Keys and Belize. My youngest son, Zachary, is too young to dive so I took him snorkeling while the others dove. While on the boat riding out to the reef, I observed a number of the folks getting ready for their first snorkeling experience. There was, surprisingly, a lot of anxiety in the group. Several, obviously poor swimmers, were worrying about staying afloat in the 10-20 foot deep wa [...]

This blog is about innovation, idea generation and the trials and tribulations of starting a new business. We have lots more ideas than we could ever do anything about so why not share them? Someone else might be able to add something else to the idea or might be perfectly situated to immediately act upon it. We are big believers in open sourcing here at the Appalachian Group and are proud to apply the principles to ideas other than just software products. We hope that you will share back with u [...]