When I started writing my blog I was prolific. One a day. Every day. Over time I got busier and busier. And the blog suffered. Still does. I’m still writing but not always here. If you’ve checked the sidebar on some of my pages you’d have noticed I write for Fistful of Talent and HRExaminer. So if you don’t see something here… chances are there’s something there.

In fact, this week was a two-fer. One on Fistful and one on HRExaminer

Fistful of Talent

Have you wondered why some of your innovation efforts have failed? Wonder why when you say to your teams – “you can go wild with your ideas” – they stay tame? I address that with my post on Fistful of Talent called “Why Innovation Requires Rules.” Check it out. Here’s an excerpt…

About 10 years ago, we took in one of my son’s friends to live with us for a short time. He was from an unstable family – father absent, mother who paid little attention to him, step brothers who got more attention than him and picked on him, stayed at random homes during the week. He asked me if he could stay with us. He was 13 at the time. We asked his mom and she said sure. That sums up the situation right there. But this isn’t a story about how to raise kids. This is a story about how to drive innovation.

One day, we were sitting around talking with the kids (ours +1) and our guest says…

“I like it here with you guys. You have rules. I like that.”

Think about that for a minute. You would think that a 13-year-old boy would love to live in a world without rules. Running wild, all “Lord of the Flies.”

Interested? Click out and read the rest.

HRExaminer

By happenstance I also had a post go live this week on the HRExaminer site. Called “HR and the Red Queen’s Race”. In this post I wax poetic and philosophic on whether we’re working so hard and fast that we’re really not getting the important, bigger work done well. Are we so focused on speed we’ve ignored effective? From the post:

When I see what is going on in HR today all I hear is this dialogue between the Red Queen and Alice in the book “Through the Looking-Glass:”

“Well, in our country,” said Alice, still panting a little, “you’d generally get to somewhere else—if you run very fast for a long time, as we’ve been doing.”

“A slow sort of country!” said the Queen. “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!”

Is HR running the Red Queen’s Race? Are we getting caught up in the minutia where change and progress is easy to see, yet with all our “progress” we’re still in the same place when we pull back the camera and see the big picture?

Are you on the same treadmill? Maybe. Check out the post and then evaluate your own work flow.