Author: Alexis

  • Chief of Staff Academy

    Chief of Staff Academy

    A few weeks back, I attended McChrystal Group Chief of Staff Virtual Academy. I was looking to stretch my thinking to further grow in the role. Since then, I keep a copy of the Chief of Staff four quadrants on my desk to remind me where the focus should be depending on the topic, and…

  • Three Questions to Replace You

    Three Questions to Replace You

    What are the three questions you would ask a potential Chief of Staff that would replace you?

  • Crossed-interviews with Appreciative Inquiry

    Crossed-interviews with Appreciative Inquiry

    In a previous post, I described a great approach to get people to get to know each other a little bit more thanks to a fantastic one-on-one format. Try it, you will see yourself, it is really fantastic! Another approach to get people to know each other is to use Appreciative Inquiry. I used nearly…

  • It is not Customer-First, it is Customer-Centered

    It is not Customer-First, it is Customer-Centered

    Who wouldn’t dream of being in a People First company? A lot made it a philosophy like Vineet Nayar, the celebrated CEO of HCL Technologies, recounting in his book Employees First, Customers Second: Turning Conventional Management Upside Down. Being a People-First company is adopting the posture of a servant leader, as described by Robert K.…

  • The 10 rules of Alan Mulally

    The 10 rules of Alan Mulally

    American Icon: Alan Mulally and the Fight to Save Ford Motor Company by Bryce G. Hoffman is an amazing book. The New York Times said about it: A compelling narrative that reads more like a thriller than a business book. I could not have said it better! I posted a while back a quote from…

  • Human-Centric Agility Coaching

    Human-Centric Agility Coaching

    Geof Ellingham, Business agility champion and leadership coach, gave his insights about Agile Coaching in this new episode of Le Podcast.

  • The Job of an Open Leader – Preethi Thomas

    The Job of an Open Leader – Preethi Thomas

    Preethi Thomas, Software Engineering Manager at Red Hat, joined for this episode of Le Podcast to give her insights about the job of an Open Leader.

  • The 4 BEPS Axes of a Leader

    The 4 BEPS Axes of a Leader

    The 4 axes of a leader emerged from conversations in which I was trying to explain what a manager is not expected to do. The attempts to tell people that they should not split the work items, or distribute the work between the team members were leading to a lot of incomprehension. With the help…

  • Celebrating the First Season!

    Celebrating the First Season!

    Yay! The first season of Le Podcast comes to an end! It is time to celebrate and thank the guests and the listeners! Season One is composed of 15 episodes covering leadership and team building. The top 3 (in terms of audience, I love them all equally 🙂 ) is: Do you want 10x Engineers?…

  • The Motive

    The Motive

    Why so many leaders abdicate their most important responsibilities? The sentence above is the subtitle of The Motive, a book by Patrick Lencioni, the famous author of The Five Dysfunctions of a Team and The Advantage. The first part of the book is a business fable. If you read I am a Software Engineer and…

  • The Culture Map

    The Culture Map

    The Culture Map is an excellent book by Erin Meyer. As my current team evolves in an international context, I had the idea to use the culture map as an icebreaker to start one of our quarterly meetings. The team is composed of people from France, Germany, Spain, Sweden, and The Netherlands. The team has…

  • Aesop’s Fables in an enterprise setting

    His words piqued our interest so we reached out to Ranjith to learn more about what he’s up to and how the book helped him. Here’s what he had to say.