These two “E-F-F” words are what drives a lot of what happens in society today. If you want to run a successful business or a successful organization, you’ve gotta find a way to increase your efficiency, while maximizing your effectiveness. But which one is more important? As is often the case in life, it depends …
Category Archives: Business
Square Peg for a Square Hole Inside of a Square
Every couple of weeks or so, Ben Thompson from Stratechery and James Allworth from Harvard Business Review sit down to talk tech and society. On their most recent episode, I couldn’t help but think of some of the parallel applications to the public service. At around the 30-minute mark of the podcast, the two start …
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The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same… Wait What?
Change management is the cornerstone of shepherding an organization through and to change. And since change is the only constant in life [side note: how many articles are there out there about change management where you think Heraclitus is not mentioned?], it seems pretty important that we understand the best ways to go about doing …
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The Inevitability of Change Forces Faith in the Flexibility of the Flow
You awake on Monday morning ready to meet the day. You’re excited about work today because your new manager is finally ready to join the team. You feel pretty happy to prepare to change your signature from A/Manager back to Senior Analyst/Officer/etc. You get yourself ready to go and make your favourite breakfast because – why not …
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Silence Isn’t Golden: Everyone Thinks You Should Speak
You’re sitting in the weekly management meeting and the senior person at the table is running through the agenda at a fevered pace. Decisions are being made, left, right, and center, and you can barely keep up with what’s going on. Wondering if you’re alone, you look around the table and it seems that most …
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Ohh, You Betta Recognize!
The other day I was feeling particularly spry. There was a jump in my step and I went about my day with great jubilance. You could argue for any number of things that contributed to this feeling, but in reflecting back on it, I’d argue strongly that there was a direct link to my being …
Top-Down, Bottom-Up, Over Sideways and Under
In case you hadn’t noticed, culture change is top of mind seemingly everywhere. The Auditor General of Canada had some, oh, shall we say harsh (?), words last week [Emphasis Added]: “…little has been said about the culture that fosters incomprehensible failures.” There were rather hearty discussions on GCconnex and on Twitter and those were …
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Have You Had Your Culture Change Today?
In 2008, the “neighbourhood coffee shop” closed its doors across the US at precisely 5:30p for three hours to retrain its employees on everything from the sound the milk should make when it’s being heated to the particulars of the colour of espresso shots. Fast-forward ten years and the “neighbourhood coffee shop” is at it …
How Might We… Stimulate Information Sharing?
Before I went on an extended hiatus, I used to try and string together a few posts into a series. In that same vein, I thought I’d start another one of those, but I won’t specifically string them together by appending “Part 1, 2, etc.” on the end, nor will I necessarily link to previous …
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Would You Go to the Gym, If It Would Save a Life?
That’s what Jen-Hsien Chiu thinks. Chiu, a graduate of the Royal College of Art in London, developed Phabit – a “smart pot” that will nurture a plant, depending on whether or not you stick to your habit. There’s actually some nuance to it. Users of the app complete a personality quiz that puts them into …
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Jeremiah Stanghini 