By: Thomas Schlick Picture this. You are sitting in your office, quite content with the month’s performance, and excited about the year ahead for you and your entire company. The date is early February 2020. Then in late February/early March, you encounter the classic “cliff event.” Everything in your organization

By: Thomas Schlick When you ask your leadership team about a high-performance workplace, how do they describe it? For many on your team, it may mean “hitting the numbers”, low employee turnover, and your employees getting promotions. Today, these criteria would barely make the list. Creating a high-performance workplace in

By: Mackenzie Doheny   Let’s be SUPER real — absolutely no one on this planet is perfect, and every single one of us makes mistakes. Things get overlooked, we get too busy, we forget. We wrote it on our sticky note, then stuck it to the inside of our notebook,

By: John Sandahl   You’ve built a team with your direct reports. You meet fairly regularly, and the conversation is always polite and respectful but rarely inspired. The team’s results are, similarly rarely inspired. But your company needs your team to pick up the pace and start generating more results.

By: Thomas Schlick   Hey, who doesn’t like a little recognition? You work hard, do your best, and it just seems natural that your boss or a peer would acknowledge what you’ve done. Well, just like anyone else, I can promise your employees enjoy a “job well done!” here and

By: Gary Cohen   Today’s business environment is VUCA. What is VUCA? It’s an acronym that stands for Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity. VUCA Defined Within a VUCA environment, leaders shouldn’t presume that order can be easily created, maintained, restored, or even ascertained. There are just too many moving pieces—in

By: Thomas Schlick   Have you ever had an employee leave voluntarily whom you really didn’t want to lose? We often call this “regrettable turnover” – because when these people leave your organization they take a part of your company’s future with them.   Let me share a personal story

  As the company’s leader, you expect a resounding “yes” to this question! But is that accurate? One way to gauge things would be to practice some good old MBWA (Management By Wandering Around). What do you see? Are your people fully engaged in applying the company’s values to their

What is more important to team performance, being on the right page or being on the same page? Many business journals celebrate those who continue to make the “right” decisions. We applaud the captains of industry who get things right every time (even if we have our doubts). Maybe, though,

By: Gary Cohen While it’s important to have one basic org chart—to be posted on the intranet, hung up and shared at meetings, constantly maintained by HR, and published with every new employee hire—you can learn a lot from more sophisticated org charts. Org charts can be arranged by function,

By: John Sandahl In my last post I referenced the ABC’s of internal motivation (Link to past article) and mentioned that watching my new baby learn at an alarmingly fast rate has reminded me how important the ABC’s (Autonomy, Belonging and Competence) are for both the father of babies, and

Good question! And the answer is…everything! Even if you don’t consider yourself in the service business. My new book, Jumpstart Your Service Revolution, has just been launched – and it is chock full of practical examples of how to win an age of disruption. The premise is that almost every

ARC Advisory Group conducted research in Q4 of 2016 to understand how companies were dealing with the “great digitization”. Their overarching conclusion: Digital Transformation is happening much faster than most leaders anticipated, and the pace of change is accelerating. Smart connected sensors, digital networks, artificial intelligence, and advanced analytics are

If you aren’t sure, you’re not alone. According to Robert Kaplan, creator of the Balanced Scorecard, the main cause of strategic planning failure is poor execution. And Kotter International determined that, on average, 70% of new, large-scale strategic initiatives fall short of their goal, as did a similar McKinsey &

Created using Visme. An easy-to-use Infographic Maker. By: Gary Cohen

In general, the Geneva airport runs like a Swiss watch, as the saying goes. But not every operation at the airport runs with the country’s trademark efficiency. As I was being checked in by SAS Airlines (the airline you might have read about at Harvard Business School), the woman at

  by Madisyn Taylor Like birds flying in a V, when we feel the presence of others moving along side of us, there is little we cannot accomplish. As they swoop, drift, and glide, inscribing magnificent patterns across the sky, birds are serene displays of grace and beauty. Long a

Position Profile – VOBS – Director of Development Position Profile On behalf of our client, Voyageur Outward Bound School, CohenTaylor Executive Search Services is conducting a retained search for Director of Development Voyageur Outward Bound School at a Glance ·  Founded in 1964 in the Boundary Waters of Northern Minnesota

  An Interview on Becoming Wise with Krista Tippett Becoming wise is a bar that most of us should reach for. And it is a difficult one to achieve. I have had the good fortune of knowing Krista Tippett for the past five years and the pleasure, like many of

Anand Giridharadas is a friend who is a brilliant thinker and writer for The New York Times. I have only just begun to get to know him, and the courage and wisdom he shares is daring. Anand is speaking this week at St. Thomas University’s annual event: The Forum of

“The human mind gets creased into a way of seeing things.” -Antoine Lavoisier, Reflections on Phlogiston Kripkean Dogmatist If you are showing up as a Kripkean Dogmatist then you treat any new information that disagrees with your position as irrelevant. The moment you know that what you are hearing, reading

When the gears of your organization or team lock up, how often is it because someone is waiting for permission to take action? And how frustrated, angry, and irritated do you get when this happens? What does it mean to be responsible? At Pixar, there is a collaborative culture and

CEO of Blue Plate Restaurant Company “We’d been in business for about 15 years prior to doing strategic planning with Gary and his team from CO2. The direction, clarity, communication and, most importantly, the buy-in from our company’s leadership has been priceless. We follow the CO2 way of planning every