Colin D. Baird

When employees are empowered to share what they know, then experience that those concerns matter, organizational change becomes easier to facilitate.

Understanding the distinction between managers and leaders is fundamental to increasing the speed at which people and organizations are continuously transformed.

Understanding what Japanese statistician and engineer Dr. Genichi Taguchi taught can help today’s executives avoid aiming at the wrong targets for growing their businesses.

Change: this time of year, it's in the air. And yet, the transformation of American leadership––that for years has been long sought after to improve America's employees and her manufacturing base–just never seems to materialize. When change becomes necessary, however, say due to a company crisis, that change just can't come fast enough for most CEOs.

In the world of business, good change is brutally hard. And changing a culture is even harder—that is, without demonstrating a better way for employees to physically and mentally do the work they were hired to do.

When executives don’t perform well, sadly, sometimes they're fired. But when the company’s merit rating system doesn’t improve employees, do you fire it too?

Learning requires we detect and correct errors in our thinking. But learning often requires we go beyond just one iteration of questions and answers to do so. Here's how to maximize learning and communications, even during difficult conversations.

Change is inevitable and it's hard, but how you lead it sets the tone for your entire organization. While achieving short-term deliverables is possible using fear as your dominant motivator, the probability of making long-term improvements stick from short-term thinking, or from too big of an improvement project, is nil. That kind of change is bad. Make change good however, and the corresponding improvements become sustainable, and appreciated by those whose lives are influenced by it.

Max Schireson resigned recently as CEO of MongoDB to spend more time with his family. It turns out that while the 300,000 miles he logged in travel each year between New York and Palo Alto were brief, the results were enduring.