orangutang, 2013, top post, Toby Elwin, blog

Top 10 blog posts for 2013, 10 to 6

Top blogs for 2013, Bingo the management guru and his change lever, Toby Elwin

Famed management guru, Bingo, demonstrates the new lever sure to move all employees into 2014.

Closing out 2013 I look back at the year’s most viewed posts with a chance to reflect on different blog topics that people most view.

In descending order:

10. The key to innovation may be better employee hygiene

Hygiene is a set of standards that lead to healthy conditions.  Washing your hands before eating or flossing your teeth are hygiene examples that come to mind.  Despite health claims for dental hygiene and preventive care many still do not floss their teeth.

Work hygiene is not about the break-room refrigerator being clean.  Work hygiene, as advocated by humanist thinkers like Herzberg and Maslow, rely on needs to ensure an employee is not dissatisfied.

Unless you practice a Bob Marley management philosophy:  no hygiene, no innovation.

9. Competing values drives your organization out of business

What is culture but a way things get done?

At times unspoken, at times expected, at times unidentifiable, but always the elephant in the room.  Culture creates a standard and standard adherence is certain for organization decade.

Constant change forces constant change.  Culture is the lever to move the world and identification of culture remains critical to the lever required to move the world.

This 2009 post provides a tool to identify culture and strategically leverage culture – four years later, that remains important.

8. Change management bottom up or top down

From the bottom things look a mess.  Don’t believe me?  Why not ask.

Therein lies the problem:  you do not, genuinely, ask.

Without tapping into the foundation where work gets done too many believe their executive compelling case for change is enough.  It is not your urgency, Mr. Executive, that people care about, it is about their sense of how things get done and what it means for their job, at their desk.  This 2010 post begs expansion on the Kotter change model so often prescribed for success.

7. Mergers and acquisitions failures are project management failures

Build versus buy remains a constant challenge.  And merger and acquisition failure, after the art of the deal, are strikingly high.

Success of the merger or acquisition is an ability to deliver within budget, on time, and up to expectation (scope).  Under those expectations you really have a project.

Mergers and acquisitions as a project to manage takes evaluation from what lines executive and investment bank coffers at the front end to the actual ability to deliver on the merger and acquisition synergy sell of sobriety years later.  In 2010 I said, “you can’t get there from here”, seems still a road less traveled.  So, why not project management?

6. Highlight change management — an introduction to Appreciative Inquiry —

Who can appreciate change efforts fail at a staggering rate of 70% to 90%  – give or take a basis point?

Change can take many forms:

  • A possibility,
  • A threat,
  • A hope,
  • A mandate,
  • A strategy,
  • A prayer

What about change as invitation?  What about change to appreciate what could be?

With success of current-state change practice, what is to lose?  This 2012 post presents a new approach, with tried and true resources, towards success.  You can not seriously go to your executive with another bet sure to lose?  Try betting your own money on that approach.  Or try what Appreciative Inquiry can do for your cause.

Next: Top 10 blog posts for 2013, 5 to 1

Compare toTop 10 blog posts for 2012, 10 to 6

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