Category: General

  • Primary Team

    Primary Team

    In The Five Dysfunctions of a Team, Patrick Lencioni tells the story of an executive team. To avoid having the functional leaders be only interested in their own department, the CEO asks them to consider the Leadership Team as their primary team. The idea of a primary team that takes precedence over all the others…

  • Resolution for the Exhausted

    Resolution for the Exhausted

    What seemed to be a long time ago, I started my first post of the year by telling you that I opened a Gym Club in January and told you what happened to that club in February. More important, you will find in the post mentioned above suggestion to keep up with your resolutions. The…

  • What a Coding Dojo taught me about agile

    What a Coding Dojo taught me about agile

    In their article, What is agile?, Jen Krieger, Daniel Oh, and Matt Takane discuss what we at Red Hat consider the most important sentence of the Agile Manifesto: “We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it.” I like this sentence because it helps to understand why we could apply…

  • Another book discussion club

    Another book discussion club

    I believe I already told you a lot about the benefit of participating or facilitating a book discussion club. Last week, I received in a tweet another proof of that. I was amazed by the quality of the visualization the people from the book discussion club at Conserto came up with. Sebastien tweeted the visualization…

  • 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…

  • 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…