Shulist Group Inc.

In our work we often get involved with budget review and preparation for small businesses. In many engagements we have been asked to review specific budgets and comment or provide advice and improvements. While there is no absolute formula to creating budgets there are some areas that seem to continuously creep into planning that can be avoided to ensure you get the best budget for your effort. Here are five areas that many budgets fail;
Continue reading ‘Top Five Budget Pratfalls’ »

As engineers we are often prone to frittering away countless hours of time delving into obscure information to no sound purpose, but often stumbling across an interesting tidbit. As was the case recently in our musings in the IEEE space, we came across an interesting scorecard of patents for a variety of industries.
Continue reading ‘Patent Power’ »

Three Truths of Cycling: A Leader’s Insight

A few summers ago I had the opportunity to ride one of the most pleasant bicycle routes in Ontario. My daughter invited me down to join her on a ride through Wolfe Island which is a ten minute ferry ride south of Kingston. Now Wolfe Island is no Tour de France but it is a great location for some easy rolling. It also has spectacular views of the Kingston waterfront, the lake boat shipping channels, and summer sailboat races. Not to mention that the locals on the Island have a completely different perspective on how life should proceed.

During part of that ride my daughter was not her usual talkative self and we filled the gaps in the conversation with the spectacular views and thinking about where we were. It was during one of those lulls in conversation that I made an important connection between leadership coaching and the truth about bicycling. Continue reading ‘Bicycle Leadership’ »

Memo to: Ministry of Buzzwords

Subject:   Just stop it!

Recently I was listening to a radio broadcast where some management guru was espousing on his latest suggestion to all those who are deep into employee leadership. He was rattling on about how it is so bad to give employees feedback as its focus is so last week. So he recommended that we all use his latest suggestion called (wait for it) feed-forward!

Wow, was I enlightened. In my humble world I would have called that setting objectives and expectations which, in my experience, is best done by offering suggestions for achievements and altering behaviours. What’s with these folks that need to create new buzzwords for stuff we already have words for?

As a consultant I know it is important to differentiate your unique process or service offering, but creating buzzwords is just not the way to do it. Now feed-forward is not a new buzzword, but it is one that we should have dropped from our language, at it relates to leadership, a long time ago.

I don’t know about you, but I have reached my tolerance limit for buzzword creation.

I have always been perplexed by the leadership challenge of how to minimize the risks of delegating responsibility while ensuring that the work was done right. How does a leader encourage employees to take on tasks, assume risk and still get the job done right? Further, in this rapid paced world we all work in, I find that not a lot of time is spent on analyzing the outcomes of decisions to improve the odds of “getting it right” the next time. Or for that matter determining if we truly did get it right? This follow up analysis is the responsibility of the leadership team, but sadly, it is rarely done.

What the heck happened here?

While leaders aren’t responsible to analyze each and every subordinate action, there should be an atmosphere of encouragement around the process of evaluating outcomes. As a leader, I’ve developed a process of minimizing risks while delegating and assessing results as a follow up. This process has been developed over the past twenty years and has served me well. I apply it even today in my work as a leadership consultant.

Continue reading ‘Making Mistakes - Delegating Success’ »

Creating your future, one year at a time

The turn of a new year has always been a time to consider change. Whether you are making personal resolutions, floating a new company budget or getting yourself and your subordinates to deliver a new set of objectives, this cusp of the calendar has been a significant influence on the cycle of change since time immemorial.

There is no magic about the start of a new year, mostly it’s about being able to demark the past and focus on your clean version of the future. There is something refreshing about being able to drop a bit of last year’s baggage, toast a few past achievements and then have a blank canvas in front of you. When I used one of those big, paper-filled, briefcase-sized, planners I would even be refreshed by the smell of all that new paper. Today I have to be satisfied with the electronic glow of a blank calendar.
Continue reading ‘Begin Again—Again’ »