My two cents worth…

My Feedburner subscribers may have noticed my monetization experiment –  I recently turned on Google AdSense for my feed.  Or perhaps they haven’t noticed.  I’ve earned all of $0.02 in two weeks. My gratitude for my day job just went up about 1000%, however!

MIT formula for uncertainty: pad your estimates

I don’t have the time to delve into the entire article, so I may be misrepresenting the thrust of Spyros Makridakis, Robin M. Hogarth and Anil Gaba’s Winter 2010 article in the MIT Sloan Management Review (full article here).   Or more properly, I hope that this Forbes excerpt — Why Forecasts Fail. What To Do [...]

The only time Crossderry will beat Herding Cats

I found out that Crossderry was named to another one of those best PM blog lists (here).  Thanks Nicole… One must, however, wonder about a list that has me listed above Glen, Bas, Rich, Elizabeth, and Craig.  I appreciate the mention, but I’m afraid my ranking may overpromise and I’ll underdeliver!

Owning your change program

It has been a while since I’ve checked out my leadership counterparts on Alltop… I found some tasty posts from bloggers I hadn’t seen before.  Melissa Dutmers at Riverfork challenges us to not fall back on conventional wisdom: …that the greatest contributor to success is “active and visible executive sponsorship” (this is corporate speak meaning high [...]

The cost of control

I saw a great post by Ron Ashkenas on how controls create complexity.  We’ve been struggling with this issue in our transformation program.  We have put stronger controls and more frequent communications in place.  However, these controls and communications shouldn’t create double or triple work. Askkenas captures what drives these issues in his opening paragraph: [...]

Asking vendors partnership-promoting questions

As I closed my Q&A with Gary Cohen, I asked about working with oursourced resources.   Service and technology providers are integral parts of many projects, but too often I see them treated like arms-length vendors rather than true partners.  Crossderry: What kind of questions should we ask consultants and vendors to reinforce to them — and [...]

Help others answer “their” questions

Placing yourself in another’s shoes is one of the most effective ways to confront reality.  I particularly like  Gary Cohen‘s take on how you can use the right questions to not only express empathy, but to also increase accountability (from my Q&A with Gary, author of JUST ASK LEADERSHIP: Why Great Managers Always Ask the Right Questions. Crossderry:  I [...]

SAP’s product side is the problem

Dennis Byron here gives the most succinct gloss I’ve seen on the challenge before Hasso: Hasso Plattner wants to drive a great deal of technological innovation at SAP, and did not believe it could happen under Leo’s leadership, and without Hasso’s very direct involvement…. The product organization is full of conflicting technologies, conflicting interests, and [...]

Whose “truth” are you after?

Continuing my Q&A with Gary Cohen, author of JUST ASK LEADERSHIP: Why Great Managers Always Ask the Right Questions… Crossderry: Coming from the other direction, how can senior leadership make it safe to ask and answer questions openly and honestly? Put another way, what distinguishes an organization that cultivates “approval-seeking” from an organization that rewards “truth-seeking”? [...]

Wow, Leo Apotheker’s gone already?

Unbelievable that Leo Apotheker has already fallen on his sword.  There has been tons of chatter about Leo and his demise (Dennis Howlett here, Larry Dignan here, Michael Krigsman here, and the #leogone Twitter feed is here).  Here are a few of my thoughts and questions: Everyone at must be relieved that Hasso is back in [...]