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There's an unnoticed population of employees in business today. Strangely enough, they're also the majority. The diagram below illustrates the labels that organizations often use (knowingly or unknowingly) to classify their employees. The y-axis focuses on how a professional is measured on meeting the organizational performance criteria that fuel the business engine. The x-axis centers on how the professional fares on meeting the expectations of the human engine. In each of the four corners, we find the Stars, Sinners, Low Performers, and Saints. I'll go into more detail on the four corners of the diagram in my next post, but for now, I want to bring to your attention those falling in the middle of the diagram — the Stalwarts. These solid citizens make up the majority of employees in most organizations. The odds are you may find yourself among the Stalwarts at some point in your career, no matter how high-revving your internal drive is. If so, you probably will find yours...

Support functions, from HR and finance to product development, have to manage a complex mixture of repetitive, project and adhoc work. Teams must prepare updates and reports on a regular basis and must ensure that both internal and external customers are handled in a timely manner. They must also respond at any time to unexpected requests for action or information from across the organization – frequently urgent requests from senior managers who are unaware of the disruption they cause. On top of all this, staff may be asked to spend considerable time in meetings to discuss, review and plan their work. This environment makes it extremely difficult for managers and team leaders to measure and improve performance. Their teams may be working on multiple projects simultaneously. Without knowing who is doing what, it can be hard for leaders to help their teams prioritize tasks. Problems arise from this lack of transparency. For example, work may be unevenly allocated, with staff overwhelm...

Several years ago, I was talking with one of my colleagues about a project he was thinking about taking on. We were both solidly in the middle of our careers, but his evaluation of the possible project surprised me. He said, "There are a limited number of things that I'll be able to say I've done in my career, and I'm just not convinced that this should be one of them." What struck me about this conversation is that it took a backward-looking perspective. That is, my colleague projected himself to the end of his career and looked backward over his contribution. By contrast, most of us tend to be forward-looking. We make decisions based on how we think that particular decision might influence the next stage. This strategy can be seen clearly in politics, where politicians often make decisions based on what will help them get re-elected . Research on regret has made a similar distinction. Psychologist Tom Gilovich and his colleagues have compared the regrets o...

Have you ever wondered whether your work efforts were really creating value? From what I've seen in organizations, a lot of people have that experience. The problem is that many times they don't do anything about it. Not long ago I spoke at a company meeting about the challenges of complexity in organizations . At one point, I asked the audience members to identify and discuss simplification opportunities in their areas. During the report-outs, one woman described how she and her co-workers spent hours each week on the cosmetics of a particular report to make sure that it looked good when it went to senior management. She went on to say that this focus on style rather than substance was a waste of time. When I asked why she continued to do this, she quickly said that her boss expected it. Her boss was also in the room, and when asked about the report said, "I don't care what it looks like, as long as it has the right information." This kind of disconnect is n...

  And so it begins: the life of Apple, post Steve Jobs. Jobs announced that he would step down as CEO, effecting a smooth transition to known successor Tim Cook. Jobs is surely not just any retiring CEO. As an entrepreneur, he built a company that changed history . Like many entrepreneurial founders, he did it by force of personality and personal vision, without much concern for consensus or committees. And like many, he paid the price when the narrative took hold that he'd lost his touch, and his board lost faith. But very unlike that typical experience, he found his way back to the CEO job and put the company back in the game. It was quite a feat, and speaks to the specialness of this particular man. But now it's time for Apple as an organization to pull off a feat of its own: it needs to continue on its trajectory without a visionary founder to rally behind. It has had the luxury of having a personification of its ethos, and now it must either allow someone else to be tha...

If you're not familiar with the law of diminishing returns , it states that at a certain point adding more effort will not produce significantly more gains. The challenge is knowing when you've reached that point. For many managers this is an important question: How far do I keep going on a project before I declare that it's "good enough" — and that further effort will not significantly change the outcome? Several years ago I worked with a project team charged with increasing sales to its large corporate customers. At the first meeting the team brainstormed ways to drive up sales, but before moving ahead decided to collect data about current sales and survey sales managers and customers. Since it wasn't clear which ideas might work, this seemed like a logical next step — until the data analysis work dragged on for months as the team tried to reach the perfect answer. I've seen this pattern in many organizations where, instead of moving into action, m...

It's unusual that an analyst will ask you to stop thinking about the far future, but I need you to back away from the Corning A Day Made of Glass video on YouTube. All that clear glass is clouding your vision. More and more, as I talk with companies about their next big product innovation, they can't get far-flung ideas out of their mind. They can't wait to get there, but they can't justify making the investments needed to get there. They prevaricate while smaller, more proximal innovations, more likely to succeed rapidly, languish unattended. The ideas won't pine forever; if you don't act on them soon, someone else will. We call these innovation opportunities adjacent possibilities and we have just written a new report about them called We've blogged elsewhere on the topic ; let me share some more details with those who aren't reading Forrester's research. To get this right, you have to think right. The idea of adjacent possibilities started wi...