As I was driving to work a couple days ago, a strange question came into my mind. Why am I so different from so many men who enjoy working on their cars? They like to keep their vehicles clean, engines bright, and wheels shining. Many men (around the globe) spend hours on their cars while also dreaming of owning better cars. Being fairly mechanically inclined, I am sure I could fix just about any issue in a car but I don’t even have the interest, let alone the tools. I …

Everyone has heard this a million times, but how many actually slow down to do a good job… This lesson is taught at least daily in my observation and experience. Finding the right pace for each job is often the difference between a great job and an acceptable job.
The first time I seriously thought about this was when I was fixing a closet door at my wife’s late grandmother’s house a few years ago. The brother of my wife’s grandfather was there. After observing me work, he said (more or …

“I believe that honesty wins. Not only the kind of honesty that keeps a man’s fingers out of his neighbor’s till, but the finer honesty that will not allow a man to give less than his best, the kind of honesty that makes him count not his hours but his duties and opportunities.” ~ J.C. Penney
I was thinking this morning about what I would want to see in someone the most if I had to hire them into my company. In my mind I went through the long list: proper …

In most organizations there is a hierarchy of management. Performance of the entire organization is directly correlated to the effectiveness of this hierarchy in leading, making decisions, distributing work, and solving complex problems. In our organization management distributes performance based bonuses, adjusts salaries and promotes people to new responsibilities yearly. This year the process has been different from prior years because of different management.
Let us assume Jane the director is responsible for two managers Bob and Joe who in turn are responsible for ten employees each. Mary the top performing …

For the last couple days, I’ve been dealing with project management issues. Training, textbooks and authorities on the topic say that you must have a clearly defined scope, timeline and resource plan. There are even contract writing solutions, all kinds of methodologies, and even books that go into detail on how to arrange the parts and execute to succeed where success is defined as completing the project on-time within budget. From my experience so far, all of this is not sufficient and is ineffective at guaranteeing a truely predictable successful …