Optimizing People

fourgroupsPeople are the backbone of our companies. Even if we run net-based companies, without our people – their ideas, their hard work, their commitment, their creativity – we have nothing. Yet they are always a challenge: they don’t always get along, don’t communicate the way we’d like, don’t finish jobs on time, interpret our wishes differently than we’d like.

People-management is difficult at best, mainly because we each have our own biases and maps of the world. And goodness knows, in our own minds we are ‘right’ and everyone else ‘wrong’ – or questionable at best.

Bruce Lewin, with his Four Groups company (www.fourgroups.com) is in the business of optimizing people-performance. And he writes great white papers – quoting from the historic greats (Sun Tzu, Korzybski) to Kotter: how can we optimize performance to empower, build, change, lead, serve our people? How can we make sure our folks give us – and themselves – their best?

Lewin has broken down the systems of change for leadership, coaching, innovation, OD, change management, recruitment, outsourcing, and people-integration for mergers. His company provides white papers, psychometerics, coaching modules, and consulting to shift many of those intangible ‘people issues’ that so many other companies can avoid costly errors and fix current quagmires.

Because Lewin’s work is so thoughtful, I’d love to see him do a regular blog: he seems to have his finger on the pulse of change management – who is doing what, how it works, and what sort of difference it makes – and he has a strong, thoughtful voice. And I look forward to having us add some decision facilitation material to his current offerings, to manage those unconscious choices that happen during change that are usually so personal we can’t touch them.

This is an important time in our global economy; changes are occuring at a corporate level that are affecting us all, and if we don’t ensure that our people are coming through this with personal integrity, leadership skills, and the ability to create and communicate, we are wasting an opportunity to serve our folks and the world.

Lewin is one of those change agents that should have a voice here. I’m glad he’s available to be one of the change agents. We need more folks like him.

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