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November 13, 2006

Risk and Causality

The more eagerly you embrace increasing degrees of risk, the more rigorous your recognition of causality must be in order to alter your plans accordingly. If you fail to do so, you are no longer embracing risk. You are embracing failure.

November 04, 2006

Missed Opportunity

Companies need to remember that every decision is an opportunity to benefit or harm the company. A hundred negligible acts can easily equal one significant act, particularly when you're talking about the subtleties that influence morale. Negligible does not equal inconsequential. If you delegate those decisions to someone who considers them inconsequential, you need to realize that you are doing the company a disservice.

For instance, if you're eliminating an entire office, don't offer to give their computers to all comers on a first-come, first-served basis when your IT department is desperate for testing environments. Or, as it's the time of the year for food drives, if your company is having real problems with inter-departmental cohesion and cooperation, don't make the food drive a gender-based competition (particularly when various departments are dominated by one gender or the other.)

Of course, this means that every decision maker in the company must know what's going on in the company. And since you never know who might be making those decisions, everyone in the company must know what's going on in the company. The monthly company newsletter is ancient technology. Invest in the tools, and reap the rewards.