Outside-Force Business Development Firm

How to Win the Battle Within Recently, while reading a piece by Marshall Goldsmith, I was reminded of a very insightful principle one of my early coach/mentors taught me. During one of our sessions in the “Rare Book Room” at Eastern University, Dr. Harold Howard described to me the inner battle we all have. The battle goes like this… in the morning I plan to do a bunch of things that are important to me… finish my A tasks (back then we planned our days with paper and pen using an organizational system much larger than my current laptop), start three new B tasks, write 5 thank you notes, spend 30 minutes doing my MBWA (management by walking around) activities, etc. Then my day happens… and of course, I only accomplish, if I am having an awesome day, half of my plan. What happened? What happens most days? Well, Harold described what Marshall calls the planner and the doer in all of us. The planner is wide-eyed and believes you can do so much and starts the day with vigor. The doer… ...

Bring on the Tension! Dr. Shawn Wolf | Outside-Force BDF  Leaders actively create tension for and with their team by consistently holding before them a new/better future. Good leaders accomplish this by creating and sharing a compelling vision. It’s not enough to simply share the vision of the organization with the team; the leader also creates the vision of a change initiative that paves the way towards the overall vision. People have to become comfortable in discomfort. For many of a leader’s followers their own internal IOS (Internal Operating System), or mental models desire to set in stone how things are done now and they find comfort in sustaining the current state. Yet, all organizations must continue to improve to meet the needs of their customers and stay ahead of the competition. To improve something calls for some kind of change, which means people have to figure out how to be comfortable in discomfort, or creative tension. To effectively initiate and sust...

Observing is Learning in Leadership Dr. Shawn Wolf | Outside-Force BDF   The dynamic of people in the workplace is an interesting behavior to observe; I had the not so enjoyable experience of observing such choices from a gurney. And, yes, I do believe how we behave is a choice. Yep, at a way too young age, I had my right hip replaced… two and a half times!! So, some of it was self-inflicted (way too much running) but going through three significant surgeries, two of which were “crisis” mode, provided the opportunity to observe some interesting human and leader/manager behavior. “How we behave is a choice.” My second and most extensive surgery resulted from fracturing my femur, just below the ball of the bone, which of course triggered my second surgery, and first hip replacement (surgery #1 was hip resurfacing, only 18 months or so earlier). Of course, I ended up in the local emergency room, in extreme pain, and along with numerous other individuals to have variou...

Fostering a Lean Culture Through Your Employees Andrea Vaughan | Outside-Force BDF   While working for a traditional batch manufacturer in the early 2000’s we faced many of the typical challenges - bloated inventory, many interruptions in flow, frustrated team members, missed shipments, cash flow challenges, and so much more. Then we saw lean in action and it changed our paradigm. Be careful not to encourage quality over quantity; and, competitiveness over teamwork. Challenges are inevitable when you begin such a significant transformational journey. The first major impact was to the employees, and it was a doozy; how we paid our team had by using a piece rate system. When we implemented one of the first major changes, it was eliminating piece rate and moving to hourly rates. The team loved piece rate and was not happy to see it go, yet we realized as we learned Lean, that such a structure was adverse to Lean. Piece Rate encouraged quantity over quality and...