The Tale of the Two Bakeries: A Business Fable
In the small town of Glenhaven, there were two bakeries. At the north end was Whisk & Whittle, a beloved...
The Importance of Giving Feedback Early: Don’t Let Resentment Fester
Giving feedback can be uncomfortable. But holding back and letting small frustrations simmer is far worse. When we don’t address...
Getting Started with Outcome Thinking
One of the biggest challenges people face when adopting OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) is shifting from output thinking to...
Switcheroo for Practicing Difficult Conversations
A great role-playing exercise for practicing difficult conversations is The Switcheroo, which helps participants step into different perspectives and build...
What Does Good Look Like?
One of my favorite teaching tricks is having students create their own rubrics for projects. At work, you’re never given...
Building a Product Management Class
When I set out to create a course on product management three years ago, I knew it would be challenging....
Why We Struggle to Get Things Done: Five Common Pitfalls
We all have things we want to achieve—whether it’s personal goals like getting fit or professional milestones like growing a...
Five Effective Ways to Quiet a Room After a Workshop Exercise
Getting a room of workshop participants or students to settle down after a lively exercise can be tricky. But with...
The Easiest Way to Start Working with OKRs
If you’ve ever found yourself knee-deep in a project and wondering, “What the hell are we really trying to do...
What You Want isn’t Always What You Want
I was sitting on a patio with two of my dearest friends, polishing off a second bottle of wine, when...
Christina Wodtke
Christina trains companies to move from insight to execution as principal of her firm, Wodtke Consulting, and teaches the next generation of entrepreneurs at California College of the Arts and Stanford Continuing Education.
Christina has led redesigns and initial product offerings for such companies as LinkedIn, Myspace, Zynga, Yahoo!, Hot Studio, and eGreetings. She has founded two consulting startups, a product startup, and Boxes and Arrows, an online magazine of design; and she co‐founded the Information Architecture Institute. She’s the author of 101 Theses on Design, Information Architecture: Blueprints for the Web and her new book about OKRs, Radical Focus.
Currently she teaches at California College of the Arts and Stanford Continuing Education. She speaks everywhere from conferences to universities to boardrooms, and opines across the internet, but most often on eleganthack.com.