In planning for the year ahead, I find it very useful to take stock of the past year, and decide what I want to maintain and what I hope to change. What follows is a quantitative and qualitative look at my business in 2016. Big Wins I ramped up to a full-time coaching practice with [Keep Reading…]
My 10 Principles for Designing Organizations on Huffington Post
Last month I got the green-light all the way from the top to publish my writing on Huffington Post. I don’t know the exact numbers, but according to comScore in August 2013, Huffington Post had upwards of 46 million monthly U.S. unique visitors and 78 million monthly global unique visitors. That’s about 3 times the [Keep Reading…]
The one thing you can do today to make the world a more peaceful place
Whether you work in an organization of 10 or 10,000, there is probably at least one person you’re particularly not fond of. You think they’re loud and opinionated, or lazy and irresponsible, melodramatic or insensitive, too silly or too serious. You avoid them in the hallways and elevators. You cringe when they comment in meetings. [Keep Reading…]
“I Don’t Have Time to Lead”
I considered it a personal failure when I learned that a client team I’ve been coaching for the last several months has recently been working on deliverables without my knowledge. They haven’t asked for feedback and it hasn’t appeared on any project schedules. Where did I go wrong? In a chat with the product manager, [Keep Reading…]
Hostess treats their customers as badly as they treat their employees
If you haven’t heard, Hostess is filing for bankruptcy. Hostess Brands, known for making iconic snacks such as Twinkies, Ding Dongs and Ho Hos, is closing its plants, letting go of 18,000 workers, and totally liquidating its assets. A massive union strike and tremendous debt brought them here. But underneath it all, the real reason [Keep Reading…]
The Management Problem
During lunch on Monday at An Event Apart in Chicago, just after I had presented my talk What’s Your Problem? Putting Purpose Back into Your Projects, I sat with a group of gentlemen who all work on the same team at a large publishing house. They were kindly enthusiastic about my message and said it [Keep Reading…]
On Empathy and Apathy: Two Case Studies
The suffix -pathy means “feeling” or “suffering” The prefix em- means “within” or “inside” The prefix a- means “not” or “without” By definition, empathy is the opposite of apathy. Empathy is defined as “the ability to understand and share the feelings of another” — within + feeling or inside + suffering. Apathy is defined as [Keep Reading…]
How “When I…” Reasoning Poisons a Team
Earlier this year I had a client who hired me to redesign the first step in their 3-step process. The page was getting loads of customer complaints and the last three iterations on the design hadn’t helped. As always, I started the project by interviewing key stakeholders: the product manager, the product owner, the head [Keep Reading…]
Designing the Company, Not the Product
In April, I posted a tweet that became one of my most retweeted of all time. Designing the product is all for naught if you don’t first take the time to design the organization. — Whitney Hess (@whitneyhess) April 20, 2012 It was a single statement that was the culmination of 9 months of identity [Keep Reading…]
The Most Valuable Thing They Teach at Harvard Business School
It all comes down to one word: empathy. At Harvard Business School, renowned professor Clay Christensen helps his students see that the role of a business is to solve someone’s problem -– and therefore, by their very nature, all businesses are an exercise in empathy. James Allworth, a fellow at Harvard Business School’s Forum for [Keep Reading…]
