Categories

September 28, 2017

Is Your Corporate Mission Just Lip Service? How to Build a Culture by Design

Building a Culture by Design™ I’ve worked in some awesome companies— collaborative, educational, challenging, and most of all… fun! The best jobs have always had the best people. I’ve also worked in some not-so-great environments— political, demanding (in that “oh...

September 15, 2017

Hey, COACH! 5 Coaching Tips to Use as a Manager

Helping Your Team Succeed! I love coaching teams, and I love being part of a team— and learning how to help them perform at a higher level! I’ve had the privilege of coaching a state-championship high school team, national club...

August 31, 2017

Are You the Best Leader You Can Be? (Part 1)

Part 1 – Develop a Model for Your Team How do you grow your leadership abilities? How do you lead your team or organization? If your library is like mine, you probably have a shelf full of best-sellers like: The 7...

August 24, 2017

I Love Being Right

I love being right… and the importance of creating meaningful culture visuals is one of those times. Being right doesn’t happen as often as I think it should happen but when it does— it feels sweet. Yes, one of my many...

July 28, 2017

5 Benchmarking Tips For Product Design Inspiration

Where does an idea come from? Do ideas spring into the mind fully formed? Of course not! Ideas rarely start out beautiful— they need to be collected, nurtured, and built upon. Ideas are inspired (stolen) from something else that we’ve...

June 8, 2017

Effective Prototype Development

Don’t Waste Precious Resources During the space race of the 1960’s, as the legend goes, NASA engineers encountered a challenge. Astronauts needed to take notes in space but typical ballpoint pens did not function in a Zero-G environment. NASA funneled millions...

June 2, 2017

Tips to Overcoming Decision-Making Barriers

Don’t Settle for Second Best After a design choice has been made, have you ever had the sinking feeling that you inadvertently settled for second best? The process can be frustrating. It always seems to take more time to piece together...

May 16, 2017

Finding Your Sweet Spot

A New DISHER Culture Characteristic DISHER’s mission, Make a Positive Difference, has driven our team behaviors creating a culture that was recently ranked 5th in the nation. These core behaviors are spelled out in our 12 Culture Characteristics (CCs), they’re talked...

April 20, 2017

5 Tips to Intelligent Decision Making

Relating to Product Development & Program Management How do you make decisions? Do you delegate the task to others, delay it with endless research, or maybe apply a democratic process where everyone gets a chance to vote? While it’s easy for...

April 14, 2017

The Power of the Checklist

Relying on Memory is a Bad Strategy I’ve read a number of blogs and articles recently that have had titles like these: “Embracing Failure”, “Learning from our Failures”, “Fail Fast, Fail Cheap”, and so on. All were making the point that...