I consider myself a strategist and technocrat. In other words, I understand little about people. That’s probably why I haven’t been as successful a change leader I should’ve been.
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Have you ever panicked? Or felt like being in a dead-end, uncertain, or unconfident to the extent that you froze? Such things may happen in any occasion: in extreme sports, working with difficult people, managing something overwhelmingly complex or frightening, getting caught in an all-new situation, or being under a real threat of violence or serious illness.
”Esko, we need a better culture, one with better human leadership.” A colleague told me this a few years ago. Because I didn’t understand what she meant I engaged in a discussion with her. It turned out that she, neither, understood what she meant. She strongly felt something is “wrong” in our “culture” but couldn’t explain it. A “good culture” is something that is compatible with the values of the person and a "bad culture” is something that is incompatible. But what is it that really makes an organization culture “good” or “bad”?
It sometimes happens that the objectives I agree with people get forgotten and the tasks I give remain not completed. Sometimes I, too, forget my objectives and tasks. Nevertheless, majority of those people who ignore their objectives and tasks are demonstrably trustworthy, diligent, and honest. It must be a management problem. Depressed by these observations I put together three golden rules for leading by objectives.
Getting quality right has never been easy. In the good old days, the recipe for quality, at least, was clear: get your requirements right, get your plan right, get your process right, detect deviations early, find and eliminate the root-causes. By definition, good quality equaled to absence of bad quality.