Management Meditations
on Leadership, Learning and Culture
For those implementing change management, lean leadership, and the essential skills of managing people, teams and processes in today’s workplace. We provide online learning reinforced by one-on-one and team coaching to support your continuous improvement.
Please see both my own course platform Leadership-Academy.Online and my courses on Udemy.
Over 400,000 students have enrolled in our courses in more than 195 countries.
On Change Management – “Valuable content, delivered by a very experienced professional. Successful change management doesn’t happen by accident. This course has explored a structure along with the techniques required to adapt and change with increased success. Lots of common sense applied and that makes sense to me. Should be mandatory learning in every dynamic organization that wants to remain relevant in a sea of constant change.” Peter Rowan
Searching a best course for Team Leadership ends here. “Awesome! Lawrence Miller is a Highly experienced author, created topics in a very systematic manner and providing his stories of experience from Industry. Very colorful and meaningful slides once we start the course we never feel to miss any of his lectures. Thanks a lot!!
“Its just fascinating. Every second, every minute. I’m learning so much. It’s opening my eyes to so many things! Larry is just great. The way he explains things, the examples he uses, his speech, well¦ Everything is just marvelous. I loved and enjoyed every second of this course, and I’m gonna make the best of it. THANK YOU.”
“To me this is an exceptional piece of coaching which is very well presented. Very clear communication which is easy to understand as examples are numerous to get to the main point. Deep diving is done to prepare the course and practical examples are given which is close to day to day operations in any business. Hani Ul Nasir
Featured Courses
High Performance Teams, Lean Culture, Leadership, and Management Skills
From Business Thought Leader & Change Management Expert
Our instructor is Lawrence M. Miller with fifty years of experience implementing lean management, high performance teams, and creating more participative company cultures. He is author of eleven books on business management, and creator of sixteen online training courses that have seen enrollments of more than 400,000 students.
Recent Blog Posts
Leadership & My Prayer for New Year’s 2016
As a student of leadership I must offer my hopes and prayers for the coming year, and to do so I will defer to the wisdom of George Washington. It will be a critical year and those of us who give serious thought to the subject of leadership have a responsibility to speak out. I will avoid becoming overtly political, but this year will be dominated by politics. The subject of leadership and how or why voters choose leaders cannot be avoided.
Agile Strategy Execution – Genealogy and Principles
The principles and process of Agile Strategy Execution are derived from the proven experience of Toyota, Lean Startup, and Agile software development. Agile Strategy Execution is derived, not only from my experience in lean, but also from Lean Startup and Agile software development. I think it is worth considering the core principles that link these practices.
Strategy Execution – The CEO’s Greatest Challenge
Research by the Conference Board and by researchers reporting in the Harvard Business Review (March 2015) report that the execution of strategy is their greatest concern. The Conference Board’s recent Survey of CEOs revealed that chief executives are so concerned about strategy execution that they rated it as both their number one and number two most challenging issue. Agile Strategy Execution is a solution to the problem.
Get the Most from Your Teams: Optimize Autonomy and Self-Control
Many organizations are not gaining the potential benefits of teams in the workplace due to misunderstandings about team autonomy and self-control. This is a critical issue in organization design and leadership today. Let’s clarify both the benefits and the determinants of team autonomy.
Amazon versus The New York Times
I suggest that both Bezos and those interviewed for the Times article are honestly and accurately portraying the culture as seen through their eyes and their experience. Amazon is straddling the Barbarian and Builder/Explorer stage of my life cycle model. This is a good place to be in an external environment that is filled with rapidly emerging competitors and changing technologies. If you aren’t conquering you are probably about to be conquered!
Drop the Debates, Begin the Dialogues
Imagine your CEO, each time he or she was challenged, turning on the person asking the question and proclaiming “you’re loser” or, “that’s because you’re stupid!” My mother, and probably your own, taught me not to call others names. Someone said “turn the other cheek.” Why in politics is this kind of response apparently acceptable to so many people when it should immediately be recognized as uncivil behavior and a disqualification for any public office?
Donald Trump and the Essential Qualities of Leadership
The purpose of presidential campaigns is to put on display the qualities of leadership of each candidate so we may choose among them. But what are those qualities we seek, why, and do they match the needs of the age in which we live? If we were a corporate search committee we would want to align the strategic challenges of the firm with the competencies of the candidates.
Coaching and The Caring Continuum
Coaching is becoming widespread in our organizations with many people claiming to be coaches, but with very different interests and skills. To those implementing lean management it is important to recognize that every manager at Toyota has a coach or mentor. The goals of the coach and the client should be in alignment. There are a number of ways to describe the continuum of relationships between coach and client: from short-term to long-term, from focused on today’s problems to developing strategic systems and culture, from low to high intimacy. For the sake of simplicity I will divide this continuum into three zones: the Blue, Green and Red Zones of Caring.
Coaching and Culture Change: The Missing Link
If you go through my Team Leadership (Team Kata) course you will quickly be confronted with the strong suggestion that every manager and every team have a coach to lead them through the steps of lean implementation and to provide feedback to the leader and team. But, you ask, where are we going to get all these coaches? Here is a clear answer.
How to Build Lean Systems of Organizational Learning
The world of corporate training and development has yet to fully embrace the new reality of technology, online resources, and the need to integrate learning into the daily habits of all managers and team members. This requires a deliberate map of the learning process, eliminating waste, and breaking down silos.
