Tag: self-improvement

Four Years In: The Patterns That Define Performance and Leadership

Having had this blog for nearly four years, I took a look at the nature of the articles written to date, and subjects included therein, wondering if there were any patterns that emerged.  I found the resulting chart (above) interesting as a reflection of the relative importance I associate with certain topics overall.  To that end, I thought I’d provide some perspective on what’s been written to date before moving to the next article, whatever that may be.

 

Leadership and Culture

The two largest focus areas were leadership and culture, which isn’t surprising given I’ve worked for many years across corporate and consulting environments and have seen the relative impact that both can have on organizational performance on the whole.  Nearly two-thirds of my articles to date touch on leadership and one-half on culture, because they are fundamental to setting the stage for everything else you want to accomplish.

In the case of organizational excellence, courageous leadership has to be at the top of the list, given that difficult decisions and a level of fearlessness are required to achieve great things.  By contrast, hesitancy and complacency will almost always lead to suboptimized results, because there will be apprehension about innovating, challenging the status quo, and effectively managing relationships where the ability to be a partner and advisor may require difficult conversations at times.

With leadership firmly rooted, it becomes possible to establish a culture that promotes integrity, respect, collaboration, innovation, productivity, and results.  Where one or more of these dimensions is missing, it is nearly impossible to be effective without compromising performance somewhere.  That isn’t to say that you can’t deliver in an unhealthy environment, you certainly can and many organizations do.  It is very likely, however, that those gains will be short-lived and difficult to repeat or sustain because of the consequential impact of those issues on the people working in those conditions over time.  In this case, the metrics will likely tell the tale, between delivery performance, customer feedback, solution quality, and voluntary attrition (to name a few).

 

Delivery and Innovation

With the above foundation in place, the next two areas of focus were delivery and innovation, which is reassuring given that I believe strongly in the concept of actionable strategy versus one that is largely theoretical in nature.  Having worked in environments that leaned heavily on innovation without enough substantive delivery as well as ones that delivered consistently but didn’t innovate enough, the answer is to ensure both are occurring on a continual basis and managed in a very deliberate way.

Said differently, if you innovate without delivering, you won’t create tangible business value.  If you deliver without ever innovating, at some point, you will lose competitive advantage or risk obsolescence in some form or other.

 

The Role of Discipline

While not called out as a topic in itself, in most cases where I discuss delivery or IT operations, I mention discipline as well, because I believe it is a critical component of pursuing excellence in anything.  The odd contradiction that exists, is the notion that having discipline somehow implies bureaucracy or moving slowly, when the reality is the exact opposite.

Without defined, measurable, and repeatable processes, it is nearly impossible to drive continuous improvement and establish a more predictable operating environment over time.  From a delivery standpoint, having methodology isn’t about being prescriptive to the point that you lose agility, as an example, it’s about having an understood approach that you can estimate and plan effectively.  It also defines rules of engagement within and across teams so that you can partner and execute efficiently in a repeatable fashion.  Having consistent processes also allows for monitoring, governing, and improving the efficiency and efficacy of how things are done over time. 

The same could be said for leveraging architectural frameworks, common services, and design patterns as well.  There is a cost for establishing these things, but if you amortize these investments over time, they ultimately improve speed, reduce risk, improve quality, and thereby reduce TCO and complexity of an environment once they are in place.  This is because every team doesn’t invent their own way of doing things, ultimately creating complexity that needs to be maintained and supported down the road.  Said differently, it would be very difficult to have reliable estimation metrics when you never do something in a consistent way and analyze variance.

 

Mental Models and Visualization

The articles also reflect that I prefer having a logical construct and visualizations to organize, illustrate, analyze, and evaluate complex situations, such as AI and data strategy, workforce and sourcing strategy, digital manufacturing facilities, and various other situations.  Any of these topics involve many dimensions and layers of associated complexity.  Having a mental model, whether it is a functional decomposition, component model, or some other framework, is helpful for both identifying the dimensions of a problem, and also surfacing dependencies and relationships in the interest of driving transformation.

Visualizations also can help facilitate alignment across broader groups of stakeholders where a level of parallel execution is required, making dependencies and relationships more evident and easier to coordinate.

 

Wrapping Up

Overall, the purpose of writing this article was simply to pause and reflect on what has become a fairly substantive body of work over the last several years, along with recognizing the themes that reoccur time and again because they matter when excellence is your goal.  Achieving great things consistently is a byproduct of having vision, effective leadership, discipline, commitment, and a lot of tenacity.

I hope the ideas were worth considering.  Thanks for spending the time to read them.  Feedback is welcome as always.

-CJG 07/14/2025

Why Excellence Matters

A new leader in an organization once asked to understand my role.  My answer was very simple: “My role is to change mindsets.”

I’m fairly sure the expectation was something different: a laundry list of functional responsibilities, goals, in-flight activities or tasks that were top of mind, the makeup of my team, etc.  All relevant aspects of a job, to be sure, but not my primary focus.

I explained that my goal was to help transform the organization, and if I couldn’t change people’s mindsets, everything else that needed to be done was going to be much more difficult.  That’s how it is with change.

Complacency is the enemy. Excellence is a journey and you are never meant to reach the destination.

Having been part of and worked with organizations that enjoyed tremendous market share but then encountered adversity and lost their advantage, there were common characteristics, starting with basking in the glow of that success too long and losing the hunger and drive that made them successful in the first place.

The remainder of this article will explore the topic further in three dimensions: leadership, innovation, and transformation in the interest of providing some perspective on the things to look for when excellence is your goal.

Fall short of excellence, you can still be great.  Try to be great and fail?  You’re going to be average… and who wants to be part of something average?  No one who wants to win.

Courageous Leadership

As with anything, excellence has to start with leadership.  There is always resistance and friction associated with change.  That’s healthy and good because it surfaces questions and risks and, in a perfect world, the more points of view you can leverage in setting direction, the more likely you’ll avoid blind spots or avoidable mistakes just for a lack of awareness or understanding of what you are doing.

There is a level of discipline needed to accomplish great things over time and courage is a requirement, because there will inevitably be challenges, surprises, and setbacks.  How leaders respond to that adversity, through their adaptability, tenacity and resilience will ultimately have a substantial influence on what is possible overall.

Some questions to consider:

  • Is there enough risk tolerance to create space to try new ideas, fail, learn, and try again?
  • Is there discipline in your approach so that business choices are thoughtful, reasoned, intentional, measured, and driven towards clear outcomes?
  • Is there a healthy level of humility to understand that, no matter how much success there is right now, without continuing to evolve, there will always be a threat of obsolescence?

Relentless Innovation

In my article on Excellence by Design, I was deliberate in choosing the word “relentless” in terms of innovation, because I’ve seen so many instances over time of the next silver bullet meant to be a “game changer”, “disruptor”, etc. only to see that then be overtaken by the next big thing a year or so later.

One of the best things about working in technology is that it constantly gives us opportunities to do new things: to be more productive and effective, produce better outcomes, create more customer value, and be more competitive.

Some people see that as a threat, because it requires a willingness to continue to evolve, adapt, and learn.  You can’t place too much value on a deep understanding of X technology, because tomorrow Y may come along and make that knowledge fairly obsolete.  While there is an aspect of that argument that is true at an implementation level, it gives too much importance to the tools and not enough to the problems we’re ultimately trying to solve, namely creating a better customer experience, delivering a better product or service, and so on.

We need to plan like the most important thing right now won’t be the most important 6 months or even a year from now.  Assume we will want to replace it, or integrate something new to work with it, improving our overall capability and creating even more value over time.

What does that do?  In a disciplined environment, it should change our mindset about how we approach implementing new tools and technologies in the first place.  It should also influence how much exposure we create in the dependencies we place upon those tools in the process of utilizing them.

To take what could be a fairly controversial example: I’ve written multiple articles on Artificial Intelligence (AI), how to approach it, and how I think about it in various dimensions, including where it is going.  The hype surrounding these technologies is deservedly very high right now, there is a surge in investment, and a significant number of tools are and will be hitting the market.  It’s also reasonable to assume a number of “agentic” solutions will pop up, meant to solve this problem and that… ok… now what happens then?  Are things better, worse, or just different?  What is the sum of an organization that is fully deployed with all of the latest tools?  I don’t believe we have any idea and I also believe it will be terribly inefficient if we don’t ask this question right now. 

As a comparison, what history has taught us is that there will be a user plugged into these future ecosystems somewhere, with some role and responsibilities, to work in concert (and ideally in harmony) with all this automation (physical and virtual) that we’ve brought to bear on everyone’s behalf.  How will they make sense of it all?  If we drop an agent for everything, is it any different than giving someone a bunch of new applications, all of which spit recommendations and notifications and alerts at them, saying “this is what you need to do”, but leaving them to figure out which of those disconnected pieces of advice make the most sense, which should be the priority, and try somehow not to be overwhelmed?  Maybe not, because the future state might be a combination of intelligent applications (something I wrote about in The Intelligent Enterprise) and purpose-built agents that fill gaps those applications don’t cover.

Ok, so why does any of that matter?  I’m not making an argument against experimenting and leveraging AI.  My point is that, every time there is surge towards the next technology advancement, we seldom think about the reality that it will eventually evolve or be replaced by something else and we should take that into consideration as we integrate those new technologies to begin with.  The only constant is change and that’s a good thing, but we also need to be disciplined in how we think about it on an ongoing basis.

Some questions to consider:

  • Is there a thoughtful and disciplined approach to innovation in place?
  • Is there a full lifecycle-oriented view when introducing new technologies, to consider how to integrate them so they can be replaced or to retire other existing, potentially redundant solutions once they are introduced?
  • Are the new technologies being vetted, reviewed, and integrated as part of a defined ecosystem with an eye towards managing technical debt over time?

Continual Transformation

In the spirit of fostering change, it is very common for a “strategy” conversation to be rooted in a vision.  A vision sets the stage for what the future environment is meant to look like.  It is ideally compelling enough to create a clear understanding of the desired outcome and to generate momentum in the pursuit of that goal (or set of goals)… and experience has taught me this is actually NOT the first or only thing important to consider in that first step.

Sustainable change isn’t just about having a vision, it is about having the right culture.

The process for strategy definition isn’t terribly complicated at an overall level: define a vision, understand the current state, identify the gaps, develop a roadmap to fill those gaps, execute, adapt, and govern until you’re done.

The problem is that large transformation efforts are extremely difficult to deliver.  I don’t fundamentally believe that difficulty is often rooted in the lack of a clear vision or as simple as having execution issues that ultimately undermine success.  I believe successful transformation isn’t a destination to begin with.  Transformation should be a continual journey towards excellence.

How that excellence is manifest can be articulated through one or more “visions” that communicate concepts of the desired state, but that picture can and will evolve as capabilities available through automation, process, and organizational change occur.  What’s most important is having courageous leadership and the innovation mindset mentioned above, but also a culture driven to sustain that competitive advantage and hunger for success.

Said differently: With the right culture, you can likely accomplish almost any vision, but only some visions will be achievable without the right culture.

Some questions to consider in this regard:

  • Is there a vision in place for where the organization is heading today?
  • What was the “previous” vision, what happened to it, did it succeed or fail and, if so, why?
  • Is the current change viewed as a “project” or a “different way of working”? (I would argue the latter is the desired state nearly in all cases)

Wrapping Up

Having shared the above thoughts, it’s difficult to communicate what is so fundamental to excellence, which is the passion it takes to succeed in the first place. 

Excellence is a choice.  Success is a commitment.  It takes tenacity and grit to make it happen and that isn’t always easy or popular. 

There is always room to be better, even in some of the most mundane things we do every day.  That’s why courageous leadership is so important and where culture becomes critical in providing the foundation for longer-term success.

I hope the ideas were worth considering.  Thanks for spending the time to read them.  Feedback is welcome as always.

-CJG 06/05/2025