Are you a hammer or a nail?

If someone gave you a hammer to dig a hole, and you didn’t know any better, you’d probably come to the conclusion that the hammer wasn’t a great tool.   Of course, you’d be wrong because it’s the perfect tool for driving nails…it just wasn’t designed for digging holes.

This scenario seems be one of biggest challenges in many large enterprises.   We take a perfectly good tool, and try to use it in ways for which it was not designed. In the process we undermine people’s perception of the tool’s value, though no fault of the tool, not to mention our own credibility.

We also treat people like hammers and then wonder why we get suboptimal results...