Author: eikesblog
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Mizu no kokoro – managers mind like water
You would imagine martial arts masters to look dangerous. Somehow we expect a fierce and grave personality. Maybe we have seen too many martial arts movies. Maybe we don’t understand Mizu no kokoro. Fact is: most of the masters I met are not like this. When I met Fritz Nöpel, 10th degree black belt and Germanys…
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Execution: most valuable lesson from martial arts
Recently I got asked: “What is the most valuable lesson from martial training for your career as a manager?” The things I believe I have learned in those 25+ years briefly flashed through my mind. But without hesitation I answered: “Execution in risky situations. Without excuses or evasions.” Let me explain! Let’s face it! I learned…
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Company-criticism: the evil twin of self-criticism
I like a healthy dose of self-criticism (more on that later). That is probably why it took me quite a while to discover the following anti-pattern: certain coworkers seem to show loads of self-criticism. They often say: “we do this wrong, we do that wrong!” But when you look closer you find that by “we” they…
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Know yourself! 6 ways to implement
Sun Tzu is arguably the most well known eastern strategist. His famous book “The art of war” has almost become a part of pop culture. The book holds thirteen chapters full of advice on warfare. But Sun Tzu’s most important instruction in my opinion is: know yourself! Lost in translation I noticed I have not…
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Great managers: secrets shared with karate masters
One of the blogs about Karate I love to read is Jesse Enkamp’s. Jesse – unlike me – manages to explain complex concepts using simple sentences. Great Managers and Karate Masters Recently he posted an article about the one secret that all Karate masters have in common. It immediately resonated both, with my martial artist’s…
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Single point of truth: 6 suggestions
The other day I received two emails from my engineers. Both of them had summarized a meeting they had attended representing their respective business units. If I had not known their emails were describing the same meeting I could not have told: They both gave me a totally different summary. Clearly we were in need…
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Leadership rule number one
Tons of books have been written on leadership. There are dozens of styles and concepts, each with a nice name tag attached. Maybe that is why so many managers are confused about ground rules of leadership today. Here is my leadership rule #1: People should feel better when doing the right thing than when doing…
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Perverted Peter Principle: cold progression
In the twenty odd years I have helped organizations to improve their level of professionalism I have discovered a phenomenon that I named ‘Perverted Peter Principle’. Its mine. It has my copyright on it. Patent pending… Where was I? Peter Principle I guess you know the classical Peter principle (see here). It is a theory…
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Site moved to kikentai-management.com
Site moved Dear readers, as this blog is taking shape I decided to have the site moved to the correct URL. So if you bookmarked this site please update your bookmark to kikentai-management.com. The old address will redirect here for a while. Cheers, Eike
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Garbage in, garbage out: 3 reasons to avoid it
Do you know this situation? When you as a manager comment on a team producing garbage people in that team will give you reasons. One of the most common reasons they give me is: “we got garbage at our input too!”. Behold! That’s a case of ‘garbage in, garbage out’. Garbage in, garbage out? On…
