OK, this is shameless self-promotion, but I have to say that I’m really looking forward to the challenges of 2010.

New Book: My friend Leo Hopf and I have finished the final rewrite on our strategy book that will be published in May or June of this year. ReThink, ReInvent, RePosition: 12 Strategies to Make Over Your Existing Business has been in the works for a while and our publisher moved it to the front burner. The timing is perfect for companies as they come out of the current recession.

New Offerings: I’ve been facilitating workshops focused on critical and strategic thinking for about six years now. I’ve added two workshops to my offerings.

• Making and Influencing Better Business Decisions is the “follow-up” to the strategic thinking workshop.
• ReThink, ReInvent, RePosition is a one or two day workshop exploring the twelve strategies and challenge of changing an ongoing business.

New Office: The southwest has appealed to me for quite some time, so I’m adding an office in Tucson, Arizona. Now all I have to do is build a book of business.

It’s the end of the year and the decade and I’m facinated with all of the “top ten” lists coming at me. I now know the top ten medical stories, the top ten vacation spots, the top ten movies, the top ten songs, and on and on and on.

I’d like to compile a list of the top ten individual or collective lapses in good thinking from the past decade. Here are a couple of my nominees.

• What were the mortgage companies thinking when they gave NINJA (no income, no job, no asset) loans for mega-houses?
• What was Merck thinking when it kept Vioxx on the market after it’s own studies showed it to increase risk of heart failure?
• What was management at Pontiac thinking when they introduced the Aztek? (See if that doesn’t bring a smile to your face?)

Please add to the list. What were they thinking?

The Customer Is Always Right

Since founding Amazon in 1994, he has revolutionized retailing. Now he’s out to transform how we read.

For the past six years I have been conducting workshops on “critical and strategic thinking” for some of the better corporations in America. And in these workshops I cover the key attributes of critical thinking. Two of them seem to be lacking in the congressional “debates” we see played out in the news.

First, an aspect of critical thinking (or just plain good thinking) is the willingness to look at a situation from multiple points of view.  Every time I hear that congress “voted along party lines” I realize that the people who are deciding things that affect my future have abdicated their responsibility to think! This is “groupthink” at its best/worst. If all we need is a tally of party votes, we should fire all of our senators and representatives (and save a TON of money) and let a clerk tally the votes.

Second, good thinkers realize that complex problems (like healthcare, like the national debt, like the wars) do not have known or even knowable solutions – they require experimentation to discover possible part-solutions that can be combined to find a reasonable total solution. As long as both parties see this as a win-lose situation they will never undertake the bold experiments that are needed to find real solutions. They are unwilling (as seen by their actions) to risk their party reputation for the good of the country. Sorry, but that seems gutless to me.

What do you think?

Yes, I was MIA for while (but you probably didn’t notice). Time really is a scare commodity.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking about all the men and women who “get it done” in most businesses – the “middle” managers.

Picture this, it’s a holiday party and you and all the guests are eagerly awaiting the dinner bell. You strike up a conversation with your cousin TJ, the Director of Operations for a large firm. TJ has enjoyed a fairly successful 20+ year career with this employer since starting in the management training program. TJ is smart and hard-working and has moved up the ranks, gaining greater responsibility and recognition, surviving the “right sizing” of the early 21^st century and currently holds a very visible, high-pressure role. It has always been interesting to hear about TJ’s career journey because it sounds so exciting and rewarding.

But this year things are a bit different. TJ seems less enthusiastic, distracted, and even appears exhausted. You notice that TJ’s career adventure has become simply a job. “It’s just not like it used to be,” TJ explained. “Business is changing so much and it seems to me as if the rules of the game are changing. The pressures are mounting and my job is harder than ever before.”

The Rules are Changing

TJ’s situation is not that unusual for many middle managers. The rules of the game are changing and those changes come from all around us: expanded responsibilities because of globalization and a virtual workforce, advancements in technology and the use of the internet resulting in a 24×7 reality, mobility of the workforce, changing employee expectations as Boomers exit and Gen Y enters the workforce, expanding consumer power because of excess global capacity, and the constant pressure to maintain costs and improve profitability for our shareholders.

Each of these changes or trends has resulted in a marketplace that looks very different from what the previous generation of middle managers saw. The situation is further complicated by the reality that these changes are all happening concurrently.

What are your TJ’s experiencing and what can you do about it? I have some ideas and will comment later.