Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips One of the better things to do in a thinking meeting is to find things you don’t want to do. “That’s not it!” is one of the better things you can hear at a thinking meeting. For example, a few years or decades ago—I lose track—I was standing at the white board […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Remote work has its efficiencies and time savers. It isn’t all efficient. There are parts that are wasteful. There are places where we multiply waste. Beware. Learn. Remote work saves a lot of time. Some of my colleagues spend several hours a day commuting. Working remote, as some of us have done […]

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by Dwayne Phillips The conferences are cancelled this year. Will we miss them? Really? I suppose that 2020 will be remembered as the year of the coronavirus. Right or wrong, and we may never know if we were right or wrong in all this, people stayed home. We hid from mass gatherings—I didn’t know that […]

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by Dwayne Phillips There is something called the “hope nothing” meeting. In it, I hope nothing comes up that causes me pain, effort, and general angst. Hope nothing meetings are pleasant, but can be deadly. I sit in meetings. People tell me things. Sometimes they tell me things that cause me work. Sometimes they tell […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Appearances are often deceiving. As managers, we know this, but… A long, long time ago, I was sitting in a chair against the wall in a meeting. The important persons were huddled around the meeting table discussing what important persons discuss around meeting tables. To this day, I have no idea what […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Is this yet another boring meeting or a new opportunity to learn? Is this naive? I attend meetings. In my former employment, I attended several meetings each day. My current employment has reduced that to several a week. Most meetings are boring. They are inefficient. They are drudgery. Yuck. Some meetings are […]

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by Dwayne Phillips We (or at least I) need a word for those little things that give us (me) headaches. The waiter at the restaurant walked by. He had a band-aid on his thumb. “Yeah,” he acknowledged. “I just cut or burned for scraped or something my thumb and put a band-aid on it.” The […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Here is a simple exercise you can use with your team to learn something about how well you work together. Step 1: Get a deck of playing cards. Step 2: Hand every person on your team some cards. Hand some person a couple of cards and hand some persons a dozen cards. […]

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by Dwayne Phillips The pre-meeting is one of the better techniques for holding a successful meeting. Want to have a “good” meeting, i.e., one where the outcome is to my liking? Hold a pre-meeting. Meet before the meeting. Plan what you and yours will do and say in the meeting. Plan what you and yours […]

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by Dwayne Phillips Be alert when first meeting someone. You first few minutes are often the most valuable. Consultant and author Jerry Weinberg once told me, “Pay attention, your customer will tell you their problem and its solution in the first few minutes.” I have found this to be true, many times. Recent examples of […]

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