Tag Archives: alignment

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The Problem with Good Ideas

Light BulbAre good ideas ruining the effectiveness of your team or organization? Yes, you read that correctly. Are good ideas keeping you from winning? At a time when creativity and innovation are at a premium, good ideas are actually more threatening than ever.

As organizational leaders, we tend to worship good ideas. We don’t want followers who simply show up to do their work and leave, we want ones who generate ideas on their own and possess the motivation to see them through. So what makes good ideas so dangerous? The answer lies in the substantial difference between a good idea and a right idea (tweet).

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The Value of Asking “Why?”

Why? It’s one of my all-time favorite questions. I’m told I asked my parents, “why?” over and over again as a kid and apparently I’ve never grown out of it. There’s no quicker way to cut to the heart of what’s most important, which is one of the greatest responsibilities leaders have. And I’m not the only one who thinks so. In his landmark book Getting Things Done, David Allen shares six distinct ways asking, “why?” adds value. They are too good to keep to myself, so I’ve listed them here below with my own short commentary.

Why

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Core Values as Habits

It was years ago that the late Green Bay Packers football coach echoed these words as part of his famous “What It Takes to be Number One” speech:

Lombardi“Winning is not a sometime thing; it’s an all the time thing. You don’t win once in a while; you don’t do things right once in a while; you do them right all the time. Winning is a habit.  Unfortunately, so is losing.”

Reverend Lombardi (as my high school football coach referred to him) knew something about winning – that it was habitual.  But I believe he can teach us something about alignment when it comes to our core values as well.