I published the first “Hello World” on OrgHacking.com on May 19th, 2014. I quickly settled on a 1 post/week cadence and was able to sustain it for more than 5 years and 275 posts with a little bit of planning and thoughtful queuing. 

Sometimes I had several posts already lined up in my head and writing just flowed, and sometimes I had to push myself to figure out what to write about next and then to sit down and write it. Regardless of what was going on inside my head or in my life at the time, I remained committed to the 1 post/week pace. 

This month I’m making a deliberate decision to do something different. 

When this post will get published, I will already be on an almost month-long adventure, backpacking the John Muir Trail. But this time around, I deliberately haven’t queued up anything for the weeks I’ll be away from civilization and with no internet connection 🙂

I’m excited to see what insights emerge from deliberately stopping (and observing), and remain committed to resume posting again in August.

See you soon,

Itamar  

While “new managers” programs are becoming more and more popular these days, I still see a big opportunity in developing programs that are tailored to new executives — people who are going to be on the executive team for the first time, and actually, if we’re being honest, will most likely benefit many existing executives. And being a business school grad, I’m definitely not talking about what’s typically offered in their “executive programs”. 

I’m making a conscious decision to stay within the existing hierarchical paradigm in my framing here, but in many ways, this is an advanced “How can we work better together?” curriculum. Cross-functional work is becoming more and more the norm in organizations but remains the exception rather than the rule for many people in many roles. That changes when members join the executive time, and for many, this is the first time where their primary, long-last peer team is truly cross-functional. 

If I were to ever design a curriculum that’s meant to prepare people for doing this type of collaborative cross-functional work, these are the primary sources that I’d draw content and inspiration from: 

• Wageman & Nunes: Senior Leadership Teams, what it takes to make them great
• Lencioni: 5 Dysfunctions of a team; The Advantage
• Johnson: Polarity Management: identifying and managing unsolvable problems
• Kegan & Lahey: Immunity to Change
• Rosenberg: Non-Violent Communication
• Stone & Heen: Difficult conversations; Thanks for the feedback
• BICEPS / SCARF