Dr. Mark L. Vincent's Blog

One of the reasons meetings become such wastes of time and money is that leaders, managers, and meeting facilitators repeatedly fail to frame the context. Another is that leaders and managers dominate the conversation and fail to assume a sincere listening posture.

For some time now we’ve been making a distinction between Process and Product when it comes to consulting:

• Product diagnoses and tells. Process listens and helps.

By Ron Mahurin, Senior Consultant

This post originally appeared here.

(Yet Strategy – and Process – Still Matter)

There is some debate as to whether the late Peter Drucker actually ever said: “culture will eat strategy for breakfast, every time.” The phrase does not appear in any of the 35+ books he wrote. In any case, the phrase has become an oft-cited expression in the organizational change literature.

With uncertainty and disruption being the new norm in business while planning horizons are getting shorter, business is starting to look like the typical situation on any given Sunday in the NFL. Winning football teams tend to be those most successful at managing the constant barrage of disruptors and the unforeseen. In this article, I’m suggesting that football understands how to succeed in spite of disruption in a way that makes just as dramatic a difference when applied in a business or nonprofit.

How does one lead without micromanaging, most especially when there is such high risk of liability/failure/ethical compromise?  What distinction can be drawn, really, between that of Management and Leadership, when it comes to function?

Recent work with a client led to developing these thoughts on the act of scapegoating.