As you get closer to finding the right phrases and ideas to describe your company’s core values, the energy level of the room will begin to rise. How will you know you’ve arrived? The goose bumps on your arm will tell you.

Almost Matrix: This chart shows the relationships between organizational functions and the business units that form as the organization grows. These units begin to feel and act like separate businesses within the business. They can be organized around product lines, customer niches, geographical locations, or business units acting as wholly owned s

what Jack Stack, author of the Great Game of Business, calls “line of sight.” Can every employee see how what they’re doing impacts the entire firm? One organization chose improving their customer service rating as a Critical Number to focus on for one quarter. Based on this, every employee or team figured out something they could do better to impr

challenges you’re expecting candidates to face when hired and then give them 30 minutes to an hour to work through how they would handle each. Then spend another 30-minutes working through their solutions with them to see how they think and to get a sense how you might work together. If nothing else, when I’ve employed this technique I’ve picked up

If you then consider that a business is simply “people” doing “activities,” the model supports a familiar notion that you lead people and manage their activities—you don’t manage people.

The market makes you look either smart or dumb. When it’s going your way, it covers up a lot of mistakes. When fortunes reverse, all your weaknesses seem to be exposed. And there’s a counter-intuitive aspect of growing a business: when the firm is under $10 million in revenue and just a little more focus internally on establishing healthy organizat

Performance Appraisal Just as core values should be the outline for your selection and orientation process, they should also be the skeleton on which you hang your performance-appraisal system. With a little creativity, any performance measure can be made to link with a core value. In addition, organize your employee handbook into sections around e

data out there even if the initial list numbers 1,784 items, as it did the first time I did this with a client over a decade ago. People are watching to see if their contributions are being considered. Again, don’t summarize the data, give it back to the team in raw form. The only exception is if the feedback includes personal attacks. These should

However, there are a few basics to hiring that can go a long way toward making sure you’re getting the right people. The first is to understand that hiring is a numbers game. The firms that get the best people tend to get a lot of people applying for each position and the general quality of the applicant pool is so high, throwing a dart at the list