Wayne Madden’s Blog

Who would not want to be part of an organization that is growing quickly? In the life of an organization, one of the most interesting, exciting, and yet stressful times can be when the organization is booming with growth, expanding in staff, and processing orders and rolling out product or services as quickly as possible. [...]

Hopefully, the title got your attention and can’t wait to find out why anyone would possibly want to empower their organization to push back. After all, isn’t the whole point to get everyone working together, moving in the same direction, striving to meet the organization’s goals? Well, yes, but the journey to get there requires [...]

To say that an individual or an organization is “resilient” is both positive and also inspiring in terms of tugging at emotions. The entire “Rocky” movie franchise was certainly based on a central story of a resilient fighter who can take punch after punch both in life and in the ring, and yet continue to [...]

My last three posts, “The Corporate Lifecycle – An Effective, Indispensable, Framework to Shape Leadership Thinking,”  “What is the Corporate Life Cycle Model?,” and “The Perfect Leaders in the Life of a Corporation,” serve as an introduction to the use of the Corporate Life Cycle model to evaluate your business. Given the [...]

Corporation Z Now Hiring . . . Leadership Key Skill/Attributes Required Corporation Z would like to hire new leaders who are: Visionary, intuitively aware of changes in the external environment, and truly creative and innovative, willing to take large risks. Can effectively evaluate long-term needs and opportunities. Focused on producing daily and [...]

There are multiple ways that one can think about a business organization and the way that organization evolves over time. As the discipline of organization development has evolved over the years there have been various approaches to this thinking. Organizations do evolve, just as living organisms evolve over time and, [...]

When you stop and reflect at a macro level about your organization and the forces at work that either move your business forward with growth and progress or hold you back, what answers do you come up with? Many times when contemplating such a question, it is easy to think [...]

I have been working through a series of articles focused on the change force within an organization that I labeled “Accepted Information & Routines.” This very significant change force within the learning organization framework is all about gathering and interpreting information, learning as you challenge that information and apply holistic, organic, systems thinking, and then [...]

In my Introduction to Acquiring and Creating the RIGHT Information article, the first method I presented was the “search” method. I followed that up with a more in-depth look at search in my The Right Information: Tips on Searching Beyond What Falls inn Your Lap post. Let’s now turn our attention to the next method I covered regarding gathering [...]

In my Introduction to Acquiring and Creating the RIGHT Information article, the first method I presented was the “search” method. The search for related data and information is normally an every day activity for leaders in an organization and honestly, for almost anyone working. At a basic level, bits of raw data like phone numbers, email addresses, [...]

Before returning to examine search, inquiry, and observation as means of acquiring or creating information, it is probably best to explore the question of what exactly is the right information. In fact, is it even accurate to say that our goal is “information” in the end? There is an old adage that goes something like this: ” An ounce [...]

In my recent series focused on the leadership required to build a learning organization, I examined key leadership activities, attitudes, and behaviors that will fuel, drive, and inspire a learning environment. These leadership behaviors and activities are one of the three key “change forces” that I discussed in the blog post that set the foundation [...]