Dr. Duke Consulting’s Blog

Create Objectives that Boost Meeting Productivity
I've made the case that meeting productivity will be enhanced by defining objectives for your meetings objective driven meetings. Now it's time to show you how to write them. There’s a big difference between saying what you’ll talk about at a meeting (an agenda item)...

Do Your Meetings Catalyze Progress?
Imagine regularly going to team meetings that seem like a pivot point; meetings where work gets done and, when they’re over, everyone knows exactly what they will do next to make progress. You can have more productive meetings like this by building your agenda around...

Pick the Strategies Last
When fixing a problem project, the last thing you want to do is choose the right strategies. Wait, what? Did you read that right? Yes! Of course, I don’t mean that you never want to choose the perfect strategies. I mean that you need to wait and choose them last,...

Fixing Problem Projects – Get Clear About WHAT You’re Doing
If you’ve got a problem project where everyone seems to be working in different directions, there could be few things going wrong. The first thing to ensure is that the desired outcome of the project is clearly stated. (See my article Fixing Problem Projects - Part...

Fixing Problem Projects
If you have ever heard yourself asking this question: “What the (bleep) is going on? Since the kick off on this project, everyone seems to be working in different directions. Didn’t we all agree on what we were going to do?” Well, maybe … and maybe not. If the team...

Succeed Together
In my series on Facilitating Success, we’ve been looking at what to do when two months after a great strategic planning session, you’ve seen no evidence of progress on the new initiatives. So far, I’ve focused on boosting motivation by making each team’s success...

Make Reporting Success Easy
Here’s the scenario I laid out in Part 1 of Facilitating Success: It’s been two months since a planning session when the executive team enthusiastically agreed on new strategic initiatives, and you’ve seen no evidence of progress. To get things moving, I laid out the...

Facilitating Success on Major Projects
Here’s the scenario: Two months ago, you walked out of a great strategic planning session with your team thinking, “That was amazing! I am psyched about what we do and what’s coming next! Everyone is motivated to start working on the new strategic initiatives. We had...

Objective vs. Strategy
For project success, don’t confuse WHAT you want to achieve with HOW you will achieve it.

The Answer Was in My Question
What will you do to have an impact?