Leadership
The budgeting process has to be one of the most ineffective practices in management. It often hides opportunity, stunts growth and encourages unproductive behaviors and mediocrity. ^In fact, when companies win, in most cases it is despite their budgets, not because of them. And yet, as with strategy formulation, companies sink countless hours into writing budgets.
Once you’ve got the right players on the field, you’re off to a great start. Now they need to work together, steadily improve their performance, stay motivated, continue with the company and grow as leaders. In other words, they need to be managed.
Most executives know what their next project or promotion will be well before the day it starts, but too few take advantage of their insider status and the time beforehand to prepare well. That is an opportunity lost.
Your next assignment is your next chance to create results – for your organization and for your career. A smart investment of time and effort up front can make the difference between simply getting by and truly excelling, between a dead-end move and a stepping-stone to bigger and better things.
Recent discussions of health care have focused on rising costs, but these financial challenges are really just a symptom. In fact, the biggest driver of rising costs is medical progress: new drugs, new tests, new devices and new ways of using them. But this explosion of knowledge is going off within a system too fragmented and disorganized to absorb it. The result is chaos.
I recently got back from a month’s vacation – the longest I’ve ever taken, and a shocking indulgence for an American. (Last summer, I was fretting about how to pull off two weeks unplugged.) The distance, though, helped me home in on what’s actually important to my professional career – and which make-work activities merely provide the illusion of progress. Here are the activities I am going to stop cold turkey in 2012 – and perhaps you should, too.
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