jim mcglothlin
So, I kept hearing this name, Jim McGlothlin, popping up here and there. You know how it is, some new guru or method everyone’s suddenly talking about. This McGlothlin fella, he supposedly had the golden ticket for making work, well, work better. More efficient, less headaches, all that jazz. I’m always a bit skeptical of these things, but hey, I figured I’d give it a look. Can’t knock it ’til you try it, right?
I got my hands on what some folks were calling the “McGlothlin Playbook.” Wasn’t an actual book, more like a collection of principles and strict to-do lists. Lots of talk about “focused alignment” and “synergistic outputs.” Fancy words, mostly. But I decided, okay, let’s actually try to put some of this into practice. See if it holds water.
My first step was trying to apply his “Daily Goal Harmonization” technique. Sounds grand, doesn’t it? Basically, it meant everyone on the team had to publicly declare their top three tasks for the day and how they directly contributed to the “week’s grand objective,” which was another McGlothlin special. I rolled this out with a small team I was managing on a side project. This was a few years back, before I landed in my current spot.
The first week, it was chaos. People spent more time trying to phrase their tasks to fit McGlothlin’s rigid template than actually doing the work. We had these morning meetings, supposed to be quick, five-minute things. They dragged on for half an hour. Everyone trying to sound like they’d swallowed a business textbook. One guy, Mark, a really solid developer but not much for corporate speak, he’d just mumble something like, “Coding the… uh… pivotal integration module.” Poor fella looked miserable.
Then there was the “Blocker Escalation Protocol.” If you had a problem, you had to document it on a shared bright red chart, visible to everyone, including upper management who just loved to peek. McGlothlin’s idea was that public shame, or “visibility,” would magically solve problems. What it actually did was make people terrified to admit they were stuck. They’d rather struggle in silence than put their name on that cursed red chart.
I remember this one time, we were up against a tight deadline. The “Harmonization” and “Escalation” stuff was just getting in the way. I pulled the team aside, told them to forget McGlothlin for a day. “Just talk to each other,” I said. “Like normal human beings. What do you need? Who can help?” And you know what? We got more done in that one day, just by ditching the fancy protocols, than we had all week trying to follow them.
That little experiment really stuck with me. Why am I even digging this up? Well, I was sorting through some old files the other day, digital ones, and found my notes from a webinar about McGlothlin’s methods. All those promises of “transformative results.” It made me think about Mark and that red chart.
My big takeaway from trying to practice the “Jim McGlothlin” way? These systems, these one-size-fits-all solutions, they often miss the most important part: the people. You can’t just impose a rigid structure and expect miracles. You gotta be flexible, you gotta trust your team, and sometimes, the best way to communicate is just to talk, without a playbook telling you how.
So, yeah, that was my adventure with Jim McGlothlin’s philosophy. Learned a fair bit, mostly about what not to do. It’s always good to check out new ideas, but you’ve got to filter them through your own experience and common sense. That’s my practice, anyway.