Don’t Know
Dr. Eliyahu Goldratt, author of The Goal, would tell his students and colleagues to never say “I know”. I completely agree with this sentiment. Let’s explore this a bit. Let’s start with the arrogance. When someone is trying to tell me something, and I say, “I know”, I’m essentially telling them that I am so […]
Don’t Just Do It
Yeah, I know. The “just do it” mantra is thrown at us constantly. I was just at a conference where this was the header of a slide in a presentation. I get it, having a bias for action is good, but in my experience “just do it” is typically followed by “do it again” because […]
Don’t Set Priorities
Have you ever been told that you need rethink your priorities? That can be good advice, but I will add this twist: you can only have one. The plural form of priority was invented in the 1900s and the term “priorities” didn’t really show up in print until around the 1940s. Priority comes from the […]
Don’t Manage
I’ve never liked the title of Manager. Because Managers, well, manage. I don’t like to manage, and I don’t like to be managed. To me, manage means “to scrape by” or “make do”. This sounds very similar to “do more with less” that I spoke negatively about in my last post. This is no way […]
Don’t Do More with Less
Have you ever been told that you need to “do more with less”? I have. And I think this has become more prevalent during the COVID pandemic where many organizations continue to be short staffed. But honestly, this was always a thing. Companies have always had cost-cutting programs where they think they can reduce headcount […]
Don’t Make Them Feel Needed
I just finished a book titled The Capitalist Philosophers by Andrea Gabor. One chapter focused on Elton Mayo who the author (partially) attributed the invention of corporate “human relations”. This was a great contrast to the very popular “scientific management” approach introduce by Frederick Taylor who took a very adversarial approach to the labor force. […]
Don’t Be Reasonable
Mark Twain is credited with saying “The man with a new idea is a Crank, until the idea succeeds”. Most of us are the type that stand and point fingers at the “Cranks” and, being the reasonable people we are, tell them why the idea won’t succeed. Maybe we’ll even provide historical data to support […]
Don’t Give Advice
I remind myself not to give advice in two contexts. The first is closely tied to my previous blog “Don’t add value”. In this case, imagine someone has just shared a problem with you. This could be a coworker, family member, friend…or just the guy sitting next to you on the bus. If you are […]
Don’t Add Value
Everyone is trying to “add value” to everything they do. It’s a near compulsion. Many of us have even been groomed to have that “add value” mentality. I hear it a lot. Sometimes it is even advertised as a feature. A hyphenated “value-added” term has been coined. While adding value may sound applaudable, it isn’t […]
Don’t Say Yes – Part 2 of 2
Evidently, I have a lot to say on this topic, so I split it in two. In addition to what I discussed in Part 1, sometimes I find myself in danger of falling into what I call a “Yes Trap”. In this context, except for the very last one, resisting the urge to say yes […]