Jamie Notter Blog
Quote of the Day
This is a brief post with an even briefer quote. It is a line from Margaret Wheatley's Finding Our Way: Leadership for an Uncertain Time. Life seeks organization, but it uses messes to get there. Organization is a process, not a structure. (p. 27)
Blog Fan
I need to make two points in today’s post. The first is about how great blogs are. My friend Jeff De Cagna (who bought me this domain and convinced me to blog) laughs a bit about how excited I am about blogging given my reluctance to join the fray, but I am certainly...
The Power of Incompetence
For those of you who (like me) read Harvard Business Review regularly, please don’t skip the “forethought” section at the beginning. It often has some real gems in it (that don’t require 45 minutes of focused reading, either). This month is no exception. There’s an...
Separation of Strategy and Plan
Jeffrey Pfeffer’s column in Business 2.0 this month is about giving leaders the permission to say “I don’t know,” which is definitely something I support. The fallacy that leaders should know the answers all the time gets us in trouble—because instead of admitting...
Extreme Facilitation
Normally when I talk about a book on this blog, I actually read the book first, but I want to make an exception in this case. A friend of mine from my international conflict resolution days recently had a book published by Jossey-Bass. Her name is Suzanne Ghais, and...
Hiring Process
I was speaking to a CEO last night who was in the midst of hiring several people for his staff (in a hurry). This left me with a couple of things to ponder. First, and this is mostly for anyone out there who might be looking for a job right now or in the immediate...
More on Best Practices
I keep track of about 20 blogs on a regular basis, two of which are Jeff De Cagna's "The Daily Innovator" and Ben Martin's "Certified Association Executive." I've noticed that Jeff and Ben have recently been...
Re-Creation
Even though I just had a vacation in July, here I am taking a few more days off. The good kind--where I will have zero access to both email and cell phone. I am riding my bicycle from Pittsburgh, PA to my home in Gaithersburg, MD. This is a four-day ride (310...
Bad Apples
The "problem" person. The "bad apple." I hear this all the time in organizations. "What do we do about that one person who is causing trouble for everyone else? The response is typically one of two choices: fix them or fire them. The...