Kimberly Wiefling

Dear Diary –
Well, it’s been quite a week.  After 7 days of heightened attention on my interpersonal communication skills I can’t say I feel I’ve made much progress.  Aside from some encouraging email from a few friends cheering me on in my (decades old) quest to improve myself, there’s no indication that a complete transformation [...]

Dear Diary -
In the “Dear Diary #2” blog I made a commitment to re-engineer my relationship with my dad – getting unstuck from the past conversation swirling around in my head about him.  (Perhaps you made a similar commitment to doing that with a colleague or boss after reading that blog?)  After recognizing that the [...]

Dear Diary -
Well, I might have gone overboard with my focus on possibility thinking and commitment to action in conversations…  So far this week I’ve envisioned 3 outrageous breakthroughs for myself, arm-twisted 7 friends or relatives to swear an oath to manifesting their own ridiculous goals, and committed myself to a half dozen preposterous projects [...]

Dear Diary -
For Christmas one of my closest friends gave me a dish towel that says “Being unstable and b-tchy is just part of my mystique.”  Knowing that there is truth in sarcasm, and understanding the importance of good communication skills and positive relationships to project success, I’ve decided to recommit myself to improving my [...]

Key success behavior #5:  “Do the right thing”, really wraps a pretty bow around all of the previous blogs on this topic this past week, and a great many more critical leadership behaviors that I haven’t mentioned at all.  Although incomplete, all together I think the five are an impressive list:
Keep Your Promises
Don’t Lie
Don’t [...]

This is an extension of my last blog about “Don’t Blame Others”.  Today I am not only urging you not to blame other people – don’t play the victim by blaming anything at all for your problems and failures.  For many years I thought that my troubles were caused by external forces.  My career didn’t [...]

Key success behavior #3:  Don’t blame others.  It’s not that other people aren’t responsible for a lot of the crap that you have to clean up as a project leader.  It’s just that blaming them doesn’t help fix the situation, and worse – it diminishes your personal power.  I have continued to lead projects only [...]

Well, this shouldn’t come as a big surprise to anyone, but I’m sorry to say I felt the need to put this one out there as one of the keys to success as a project leader.
Key success behavior #2:  Don’t Lie.  I recently had lunch with someone who’d been lied to by her manager three [...]

In honor of summer, I’m going to keep this week’s series of blogs bite-sized so you can get back to your beach and margaritas lickity split.  This week I’ll review a few behaviors that are key to success as a project leader.
Key success behavior #1:  Keep your promises.  Sorry if this seems trivial.  I bring [...]

A while back Lisa Winter wrote a terrific blog about what leaders say when they make a mistake . . . “I’m sorry.” Her blog prompted me to explore a question.  What do leaders think when they make a mistake?  When I was a kid I was deathly afraid of making mistakes.  My dad was [...]

Inspiration is important, but we can’t depend on it showing up when needed.  It comes and goes, like a ferral cat who roams looking for a bite to eat.  We can feel inspiration waxing and waning within us, and the inspiration from the outside world can’t be counted upon to show up on a regular [...]

Some people in the corporate world still believe that people work for money.  But with a growing number of examples of people doing all kinds of work for free, it’s getting more difficult to adhere to that view.  Take Wikipedia, for example.  According to Wikinomics, by Tapscott & Williams, Wikipedia is the largest encyclopedia in [...]

As a project leader, part of your job is to inspire people to persevere in pursuit of seemingly impossible goals.  In my work, it’s not part of my job . . . that’s pretty much all I do.  A decade leading projects was the perfect preparation for this work.  Lately I’ve been spending about half [...]

If you’ve ever been inside of a tin of sardines you will have a pretty good idea of what it’s like to ride the subways of Tokyo during rush hour – only in the subway the sardines are still alive.  Even though we are packed together with greater intimacy than most sexual encounters, my inscrutable [...]

“Wicked Problem” is a label given to a problem that is basically a giant incomprehensible hairball of contradictions and complexity. Personally, I don’t feel prepared to do anything more than dabble in solving these gargantuan challenges. Governments, heads of state, and the United Nations tackle these kinds of things. For example, here’s a list of [...]

The word “intractable” supposedly originated in the mid 16th century, causing me to postulate that really tough problems didn’t exist on this planet before then.  Standing before an intractable problem is kind of like being told you have to eat an entire Cadillac. 

Technorati Tags: barriers, Breakthrough, Commitment, Impossible, Intractable, Negative-Thinking, Obstacles, Problem

When you encounter a problem that seems hauntingly familiar, you are not dealing with an ordinary thorn in your side.  You are facing a recurring problem.  You know the kind of problem I’m talking about . . . the one that, even while you are “solving it”, you have a funny feeling you’ll be seeing [...]

Here it is, Christmas day, and I sure hope Santa brought you everything you wanted.  At first I hesitated to say that, knowing that many people on this earth are not Christians, but last week in Tokyo, where people are primarily Shintos and Buddhists, Christmas preparations were in full force.  For many people it’s just [...]

Once in a while I get the urge to wear some insanely high heeled shoes.  After an evening of wobbling about on these treacherous stilts my feet feel like they’ve been tossed into a dryer with a couple of cement blocks.  Ouch!  Why do I do it?  This is just one of many examples of [...]

Sometimes we think we are dealing with problems, but we’re not.  If it’s something you can tolerate, and not worth fixing, then it’s not a problem at all, it’s an irritant.  Don’t waste your time thinking about it unless you think it’s gonna grow into a real, live problem.  And, if money can solve it, [...]

Where I live in the Silicon Valley, on the west coast of Obama country, this time of year most people are busy celebrating one holiday or another.  It’s a season I’ve come to call the “alcoholidays” for obvious reasons.  So in order to stay off of the streets and have a credible excuse for not [...]