Leave a Tip on the Table

When asked in an interview about the best advice he ever got as a performer, comedian and actor Billy Crystal recalled a conversation with his manager, Jack Rollins. Earlier in his career, Crystal’s stand-up comedy was filled with zinger after zinger, influenced greatly by comedy icons like Don Rickles. Rollins thought audiences would respond to…

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Guidelines for Asking Questions to Support Classroom Discussions

I’ve found that students don’t always know how to ask questions in class discussions, especially questions of one another. But, they can learn this skill. I’ve prepared the following that I now distribute to my students. It’s proven quite helpful. When a classmate offers an insight during a discussion… …listen. Really Listen. Jot down at…

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Liquid Culture: Shaping Organizational Culture with Ripples, Waves, and Flow

Unfreeze. Change. Refreeze. It was a useful metaphor for understanding organizational change when it was first introduced. We have German-American psychologist Kurt Lewin to thank for it. Lewin is known as one of the pioneers of social, organizational, and applied psychology in the United States. Lewin, however, likely never imagined a world like the one…

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Daniel Madren

Daniel is an MBA student at Purdue University, where he studies Organizational Leadership, Human Resources Management, and Design and Innovation. He is fascinated by complex problem solving, agile leadership, and business transformation. He is a StrategicDoing Practioner and is eager to help organizations and teams on their next giant leap. Learn more about Daniel here.

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Agile Leadership

Our companies, our communities, and our planet are facing unprecedented challenges – challenges that will not be solved by a small group of people from a single organization, department, perspective, or area of expertise. Today’s leaders need a new mindset and skillset designed to harness the power of collaboration across boundaries. Often these boundaries are…

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Let Me Give You a Hand

Among all species, our human hands are unique, not only in what they can accomplish but also in how they communicate. Human hands can paint the Sistine Chapel, pluck a guitar, maneuver surgical instruments, chisel a David, forge steel, and write poetry. They can grasp, scratch, poke, punch, feel, sense, evaluate, hold and mold the…

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Welcome to ENGT 507: Collaborative Leadership & Agile Strategy

Course Description This course provides students with a foundation in collaborative leadership and agile strategy. The course brings together theories and insights from a variety of disciplines including engineering, management, psychology, and social science. Increasingly, leaders are being called upon to apply their technical skills in collaborative environments that cut across organizational units and inter-organizational…

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Want to be a thought leader? Pay attention to the “P-Cycle”

I spent some time today talking with colleagues about thought leadership. Here are some additional insights. Thought leaders need to understand the “P-Cycle.” The “P-Cycle is the lifecycle of ideas. Each phase of an idea’s life begins with that letter. Let’s look at the stages of the P-Cycle. Progenitor Stage. All ideas have progenitors. A progenitor…

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Brightline Initiative

Hello! If you’ve landed here it must mean you participated in one of Brightline’s the recent Transformation Talks. By special arrangement we are giving away 10 copies of our book Strategic Doing: Ten Skills for Agile Leadership to those who participated in the webinar. We invite you to enter your name for a chance to…

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Core Teams: The “Solid Core” of a Strategic Doing Effort

What Is a Core Team? The “Core Team” is the key structure that enables a community or organization to effectively address complex challenges. This is typically a small group that has overall responsibility for shepherding the broader network of people who will be engaged in the Strategic Doing effort. At the beginning, the core team…

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