Who owns quality for your product? Whenever I ask that question, I am often met with one or more of the following reactions: A blank stare “Testing/Quality Assurance/Quality Control, of course!” “Management.” (lots of variations on that) “Creative/technical leadership.” So, maybe the better question is: Who defines quality?

When you outsource, how far do you push your partners on quality?  When outsourcing digital work (software, digital assets, etc.), it’s sometimes difficult to determine whether your request to fix something is really a change in what you wanted in the first place.  In addition, if you are easily able to make changes yourself, you […]

Have you ever walked away from a meeting thinking you had just witnessed a thing of beauty?  It does not happen to me very often, but I was fortunate enough to witness that twice this year.

Improving team engagement and motivation has been a hot topic for me this week.  It has become clear that the team at one of our suppliers is not performing as expected because the team’s engagement with the product and the job is not where it needs to be.  They are doing the functional part of […]

Last week Bloomberg published an article about Cisco Systems that made me sad.  It describes the effects of a management process put in place shortly after I left the company.  According to the article, it has slowed down the company, led to executive resignations and damaged the predictability of quarterly results.  For those of you […]

“What is your biggest failure and what did you do about it?”  That was one of the questions I was asked following my presentation at ITESM.  I wasn’t prepared to answer that, so the only thing that came to mind are the handful of spectacular communication failures that have occurred in my career.  Busted!  While […]