Daniel Boone once said, "I can't say I was ever lost, but I was bewildered once for three days." Many team and organization transformation and improvement efforts are lost or badly bewildered. Besides riding in smelly cabs, eating rubber chicken (or guessing the day's mystery meat), and racing through crowded airports to catch a flight, another benefit of my consulting work are the opportunities I've had to work with hundreds of leadership teams trying to improve themselves and their organizations. Some have been hugely successful. They've seen increases in response times, cycle times, customer service, quality, teamwork, morale, productivity, innovation, cost effectiveness, and the like in the dozens or even hundreds of percentages. Others have been somewhat successful in some areas of their improvement activities. And some ended up in the swamp.

In the 1980s and 1990s programs like quality circles, excellence, total quality management, teams, empowerment, and re-engineering have faded in and out of fashion. I've spent two decades researching, personally applying, consulting, building my own companies upon, writing articles, columns, and books about, and speaking on the keys to personal, team, and organizational transformation. Here are a few of the recurring themes in my work: