2008 has been a crazy year. Life was turned upside down a bit as I figured out how to be a single Dad and at the same time merged my consulting business with Management Solutions Plus. I became a CEO of an association for the first time, did enough travel…

I think forgiveness and reconciliation is absolutely the hardest part of conflict resolution. Back when I did work in the international conflict resolution field, I saw this first hand. We could help parties negotiate better, understand history better, and in general communicate  and solve problems better, but we weren’t able…

The October HBR is chock full of “myth of control” articles. I mentioned a small one yesterday, but the lead article by Scott Cook of Intuit (maker of Quicken) is all about “harnessing the masses” by building “user contribution systems.” In short, you get users (broadly defined) who will do tons of…

After my experience a few weeks ago where the group I was facilitating had a very tough time with the loose structure I placed on the meeting, I went to Los Angeles last week to do work with a different group and felt better that my co-facilitator had developed a…

I caught a little big of flack a few months ago when I suggested total transparency around financial information in organizations, which included telling everyone what everyone else made. A few people pointed out to me that it was easy for me to throw this gauntlet down, since I didn’t employ…

I know I’ve written about this before, but it bears repeating:

The only thing you control is your own behavior.

Period. Of course you can have conversations with others about their behavior. I am a big fan of giving people direct feedback, and making specific requests of them (which makes future feedback…

Here’s another quote from the Harvard Business Review article about Pixar. Last week I wrote about the difference between communicating and deciding. Today it’s an interesting quote about postmortems. I am a big fan of doing postmortem reviews of projects, mostly because I am a huge fan of learning. Organizations are…

I am a huge fans of both Lindy Dryer and Maddie Grant. They are both relative newcomers to the Association Blogging world, but they are already running circles around veterans like me these days. One thing I like about both of them is that they are doers. There’s a LOT of talk around…