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Staff Sgts. Fred Hilliker and Robert O'Hair were boarding Delta Flight 1625 in Baltimore for the final leg of their journey home from Afghanistan with 32 others in their U.S. Army unit when their homecoming came to an abrupt halt. Delta personnel told the soldiers they needed to pay $200 for each person that had a fourth bag with them , even though their military orders stated that these bags were covered. Unable to gain resolution with Delta, the two Staff Sgts filmed a YouTube video about the incident. The story generated considerable buzz for an obvious reason: What Delta did to these soldiers was wrong. I'm fairly sure that the Delta employees who were demanding payment knew it. So why didn't they just waive the fees? The Delta situation could be dismissed as an unfortunate case of miscommunication if it didn't seem so familiar. It highlights a trend in management that favors the fulfillment of quantifiable, top-down metrics. I'd bet that you've ha...

The last few months, I’ve been wondering about something. I am self-employed. I work in an office by myself. No one watches me or looks over my shoulder. I work flexible hours.  Do those hours really add up to 40 or more a week? My Productivity Experiment I did an experiment in which I calculated all of the hours I was actually working (i.e. writing, attending phone meetings, pursuing leads, responding to business-related e-mails) versus doing personal tasks or surfing the Internet. It turns out that I do indeed work 40 or more hours a week, but those hours aren’t organized in 5, 8-hour chunks like the hours of traditional employees. Rather, I am able to complete several administrative and business development tasks for my business in the morning and do heavy lifting writing in the late afternoon, when my energy level is highest. Especially if I’m sitting at my computer the whole time, I definitely lose steam between 11AM and 3PM, and again between 6PM and 9PM. ...

  Some projects can be a real pain in the you know what . Not all of them, of course. But there are some that just keep us awake at night. There can be many reasons of such a situation. Sometimes the tasks that need to be done are simply difficult to perform. Other times it’s the amount of time required that frightens us. But sometimes the most frightening thing of them all is that we don’t know what’s going on in a project, and can’t seem to find a way to plan everything out and get a clear picture of what needs to be done. In the previous parts of the series we were discussing what to do once everything is perfectly laid out.  Once we’re clear about the exact tasks that need to be done, and once we even know when we want to take care of them. But there’s one part missing, and that’s of course the part of planning your projects and selecting your priorities. Most projects we decide to execute should be defined and planned according to five main steps. ...

  How many productivity systems, methodologies, strategies or tools have you tried so far? Do you already use something that fits your needs perfectly, or are you just doing OK, still have a feeling that something could be better? Many people want to find the perfect productivity system or tool . Having such goal, they consider the “searching phase” as something bad. They think about it as time they have to waste for experimenting. If you still haven’t found your Holy Grail of Productivity – don’t worry. No one said you have to. Maybe there’s even no such thing in your case. That’s perfectly fine and doesn’t mean you cannot be more productive than others. Searching is not a waste of time Searching for the perfect solution may be frustrating (that’s completely normal), yet it doesn’t have to be. Even changing your attitude may work – turning “wasting my time” into “getting experience” can do wonders. Think that all this trying, searching and experimenting is in fact...

It's difficult to get senior executives who have been successful managing a particular way to realize that they need to change their approach. Yet this is exactly the challenge facing leaders of the finance function who are asked to help their organization improve the way that work is done. As finance shifts its focus from controlling costs to advising managers on improvement activities, CFOs must change their thinking and behaviors. Consider for example CFO Ric Magnuson of Group Health Cooperative , a nonprofit health care system in Seattle with 10,000 employees, who started out as a skeptic on the process improvement activities his company launched in 2008. He had not been exposed to the approach his company chose ("Lean"), and all the tools and concepts were new to him. "I didn't get it. I saw a lot of money being spent. I was against it." But along the way he switched from being a skeptic to being an advocate. He gives credit to mentors who helped...