Building Ethically Healthy Organizations

Too often, compliance and ethics training is little more than a rather dull necessity to minimize a company’s likelihood of litigation, indictment, fines, and jail time.  It’s all about damage control and risk management.  Narrow, reactive, negative.  Author and educator David Gill says, “Ethics is not just (or primarily) about cataloging and ranting about the evil, unjust, and ugly.  Its historic focus is on the good, the just, and the excellent.  Ethics is about excellence.“

In his new book, It’s About Excellence: Building Ethically Healthy Organizations, business ethics consultant and educator David Gill argues that the damage control approach to ethics is partial at best, misguided at worst.  He builds a compelling case that corporate ethics should be a proactive, positive account of “how we operate our company in order to achieve our mission and vision with excellence.”  Treating all  stakeholders with fairness, respect, and good ethics is not just altruism but almost always a clear competitive advantage and a step toward business excellence.

Beyond concepts and good ideas, actual business examples and cases from the trenches provide evidence that (more…)

Innovation in Silicon Valley

One input I received while conducting focus groups and interviews about what managers want from the PMI NorCal Symposium 2008 is to hear about companies like Hewlett-Packard.  As an alumnus myself (22 years at HP), I appreciate the unique contributions established by Bill [Hewlett]and Dave [Packard].  I still remember the frankness and honesty of a presentation Chuck House made to executives from a major customer during their HP factory visit.  (more…)

How to Become PMO of the Year

As a judge for the PMO of the Year sponsored by the Center for Business Practices, I was impressed by all the entries.  One in particular, however, stood out.  PMO Director at Accident Fund Insurance, Norm Buckwalter says, “Through our responsibility of leading the creation and execution of the strategic plan for the enterprise, the Innovation & Planning team has played a vital role in aligning the five year strategic plan, strategic projects and the annual budgeting process.  We have accomplished this by ensuring our executive management staff has the best information possible to make decisions on which projects will contribute to the vision in the most cost effective manner possible.  We continue to focus on improving our processes, but business results remain our team’s primary mission.” (more…)

Courageous management of priorities, projects, and people

How do you keep an organization innovative, fast-moving, and productive when facing the relentless parallel needs of ongoing operations, servicing customers, sound project decision-making among opportunities, developing incremental product enhancements, and creating major new offerings - all in the face of inevitable resource constraints?

In a time when so many dot-coms went dot-bust, Cinda Voegtli, CEO of (more…)

What is Your Leadership Style?

PMI Silicon Valley (www.pmisv.org) and Insights Learning and Development (www.insights.com) have partnered on a study to identify the current strengths and gaps in leadership and teaming effectiveness in Northern California companies.  Insights^® is a global learning and development company working in partnership with leading organizations across the world.  Insights transformational learning solutions, delivered by a worldwide team of exceptional and inspirational people, help people improve their effectiveness in five key areas:  individuals, teams, organizations, sales and leadership. (more…)

Improving Project Maturity…in Government?

How do you fix a woefully underfunded government organization and implement over 50 significant citizen serving systems in less than 4 years?  What core values helped Honolulu rise to be ranked 8th in the United States in 2007 by the Center for Digital Government for the deployment of Technology?   How do you inspire and transform government?  Gordon Bruce is the (more…)

Executing Strategy

The global business landscape is littered with expensive, well-intended strategies that don’t deliver value, often because leaders failed to identify and invest in the full range of projects required to support those strategies.  Co-author of Executing Your Strategy, Mark Morgan demonstrates what organizational alignment for strategic execution really means and how to engage it.  He introduces six imperatives that enable people to do the right strategic projects—and to do those projects right.  Those imperatives are:  Ideation, Nature, Vision, Engagement, Synthesis, Transition.  Those sharpies among us realize that the highlighted letters spell (more…)