Pensights
Performance Excellence Network Recognizes Seven with Award
2024 MN Performance Excellence Awards Presented at igniteEX 2025 Conference ST. PAUL, Minn., April 14, 2025 – The Performance Excellence Network (PEN) honors seven recipients of the 2024 Minnesota Performance Excellence Award. The Award is based on the Baldrige Framework and is the culmination of a rigorous evaluation of an organization’s management and performance system.[...]
Achieving EXtraordinary Together: 38 Insights to Excellence — Mar 2025
There's a lot going on these days. A lot. Businesses and organizations are facing increasing uncertainty and a growing number of complex challenges: the federal budget freeze, federal agencies closing or shrinking, the new (and potentially escalating tariffs), as well as shifting national policy (in areas such as immigration and DEI) are resulting in uncertain[...]
Moving from Checkers to Chess: 7 Strategies for Leaders to Navigate Today’s Chaos – February 2025
Sometimes the topic for my newsletter article just comes to me. Last week I ran across a podcast (and companion newsletter) published by Jo Saxton, a nationally known speaker, author, and leadership coach. Before I share a portion of it, let me start by saying my column is not about politics -- everything PEN does[...]
Why Good Organizations Sometimes Fail — PEN Jan 2025
I get asked occasionally what is the single biggest reason organizations fail. Of course, there isn’t one right answer: organizations -- even from the same sector or industry -- have different cultures, different core competencies, different strategic challenges and advantages, different circumstances that contribute to success or failure. As a result, some organizations struggle with[...]
Leading with Love: Insights on Leadership and on Life — December 2024
It’s not often I use this column to write a “book report,” but I was recently made aware that one of our members -- Connie Delaney, Dean at the University of Minnesota’s School of Nursing -- wrote a book on leadership: Leading with Love. I thought I’d just skim it (I have probably 30 books[...]
Exploring Life’s Priorities: Rocks, Pebbles, Sand & On Being a Time Billionaire — Nov 2024
During the COVID years, we were all given the opportunity to reflect on our mortality and on what’s truly important in life: our fast-paced daily routines came to an abrupt halt, allowing us to recalibrate -- to refocus on the priorities in each of our lives. But, while COVID isn’t over, most of us have[...]
Cool Tools: Exploring 20 Contemporaneous Continuous Improvement Tools — October 2024
“If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail,” so the saying goes. In other words, each tool -- be it for carpentry, cooking, or process improvement -- has a distinct purpose. And tools are sub-optimized if they are used for anything other than that distinct purpose – imagine trying to loosen[...]
Bridging the Partisan Divide in Our Organizations — September 2024
“The political landscape in the United States is highly polarized,” that being the opening line of a recent (August 22) Gallup study. It probably won’t surprise any of you, but I would submit that we are more divided now than anytime since the 1960s (and before that, the 1860s). The opening paragraph goes on to[...]
The Lifeblood of Any Organization: Its Culture — August 2024
Ever heard the story about the customer who brought four tires to a Nordstrom Customer Service counter to return them? As the legend goes, although Nordstrom doesn’t sell tires, the employee processed a refund anyway. Talk about a culture that 1) is highly customer focused, and also 2) completely trusts and empowers its people to[...]
The Power of Why: How Asking the Right Questions Can Change Everything — July 2024
So last weekend I was in the grocery store (I’m one of the few who actually still enjoy grocery shopping), and I overheard a young kid -- maybe four or five years old -- ask, who I assume was his mother, if he could get some cookies. She said no, to which he inquired why[...]
The Key to Sustained World Class Performance: Deliberate Practice — PEN June 2024
Everywhere you look, standards are rising. In business, in sports, in education, in healthcare – really in all aspects of human and organizational achievement – what is considered "world class" continues to increase. For example… It used to take 72 hours by plane to cross the Atlantic (1913); it now takes just over six. The[...]
Say What?? 18 Best Practices for Effective Communication – May 2024
I had a conversation with a CEO of a PEN member organization recently, in which he lamented the fact that his messages were just not getting through to employees -- he was communicating, but the messages just weren’t sticking. So I asked him what channels he was using, to which he replied the normal ways:[...]
