Ed Muzio
Ed Muzio is one of a few management consultants in the world who does systems-level coaching with a CEO or SVP and his/her staff simultaneously, helping executive teams make a cultural shift so significant that it propagates downward into how the organization runs. His work has been hailed for producing substantial results even in the most challenging circumstances, and Ed has been called “one of the planet’s clearest thinkers on management practice" by the editor of an international business magazine. His mantra is "higher output, lower stress, sustainable growth” – a promise central to his company’s mission of creating culture changers – and his books have won Awards of Excellence in the performance improvement field.
Originally trained as an engineer, Ed has started organizations large and small, led global initiatives in technology development and employee recruitment, and published articles and papers on a variety of business topics. Prior to founding Group Harmonics in 2004, Ed was President and Executive Director of a human services organization, and a leader, mentor, and technologist within Intel Corporation and the Sematech consortium. A Cornell University graduate, Ed's accomplishments include the creation and stewardship of a worldwide manufacturing infrastructure program, a nationally-recognized engineering development organization, and a non-profit residential program for at-risk youth.
Latest Articles
FAQ: “Typical North American Management”
"Typical North American Management" is the idea that management’s job is to set a strategy and a plan at the beginning of the year and then meet weekly or regularly with employees to check how things are going and report it upwards, fixing problems as they go. This sounds good, but it doesn’t work because it’s not well-matched to reality. Here's why, and how to make it better...
Meet for a Reason (C-Suite TV)
So many meetings are boring, useless, or purely for show, it’s no surprise that at work, they’re the thing we love to hate.... but maybe we don’t hate all meetings, just bad ones. Here's One Small Step to make yours better!
Don’t Be Fooled: Bigger Doesn’t Equal Slower – Letters to Leaders
Most advice about execution during growth will either covertly or overtly tell you that as you get bigger, you have no choice but to go slower. Leaders following the majority of “best practices” in organizational development and team leadership often find themselves with this exact problem; it happens so often that people, even “experts,” have come to believe it’s inevitable. But it’s the advice that’s slowing you down, not the size of your company. The highest performing entrants in most spaces – even the HUGE ones – don’t allow themselves to tip into endless status-updating with minimal decision-making.
Create Lateral Development (C-Suite TV)
Start connecting everyone on your team to a better understanding of how they’re all connected, so they can work together on your objectives even when you’re not around.
What Does ‘More Substance, Less Fluff’ Really Mean in HR & Consulting? Asking AI to figure it out went about as well as you’d...
As a management consultant I see a lot of posts about the importance and value of things like leadership, compassion, empathy, and engendering engagement in the workplace. I am in full agreement, conceptually speaking. But as a former engineer I have the unshakable sense that many of those posts are some combination of buzzword bingo and search engine optimization -- even when people try NOT to write that way. It’s like our language is watered down. So I asked AI to help me fix it.
Get Everyone Looking Up (C-Suite TV)
Quit your job as the dysfunctional parent of quarreling children and get back to running your organization through the professionals who oversee different parts of your output
The Secret Culture Choice You Don’t Know You’re Making
The choice between "Power Over" and "Power With" is subtle and often made unintentionally. Yet it has ripple effects across the organization, at both the macro level (including the caliber of results that are achievable), and the micro level (including how day-to-day operations look).
Tougher on the Top: Why I Hold Senior Team Leaders to a Higher Standard
The problem of getting a management team of any sort to act nimbly and deliver optimal results for the organization is a tricky one. I’ve made a whole career helping leaders do it well, and I’m here to tell you: I don’t think it’s easier at the top – I think it gets harder. To make matters worse, I expect more, too: the higher in the organization I’m working, the tougher a grader I become for my clients. Here's why...
Accelerating Decision-Making and Action in Complex Organizations: A Guide for Leadership
Things change fast and often don’t go as planned. You need a blend of accountability, coordination, and oversight to handle the thorny beast of reality every day. And yet, bureaucracy kills results. Ideally, you’d like your teams to compound their individual intelligence instead of checking it at the door. Can you have it both ways? The answer is yes, but it’s not as simple as saying buzzwordy things about flattening hierarchies or irresponsibly bypassing processes.
You’re Wrong, but Not Alone: Four Horrible Truths for Surviving Matrix Management
Plenty of people in matrixed organizations find themselves hamstrung between competing structures, just like I was. So, whether you’re a senior leader or middle manager, should you find yourself caught this way too, pulled apart by various parts of your company debating each other loudly, I wanted to offer you four truths that might help. They’re excerpted directly from my bestseller "Iterate: Run a Fast, Flexible, Focused Management Team," and they come with a warning: they’re not just truths – they’re horrible truths. If you’re a Ted Lasso fan, you no doubt remember Dr. Sharon telling Ted that “the truth will set you free, but first it will p**s you off.” Be warned...
Un-Sexy, Boring Management Consulting May Be Your Organization’s Perfect Fix. Here’s How.
While my peers and colleagues do great work in trendy areas like vision setting, leadership style, Agile project management, and the like, I’m sitting over here talking about what’s going on in meetings, whether graphs look forward, and how decisions get made day in and day out. I’m the weirdo who cares deeply about whether your charts are forward-looking, and goes on and on about how research on group problem solving doesn’t apply directly to management teams because it was run on groups of strangers. But don’t try to console me. I’ve made peace with my oddity, and here's why...
Changing Culture Isn’t Easy – but it’s Not THAT Complicated
Despite intense, often haughty agreement among HR and business executives about the importance of workplace culture, advocates enjoy surprisingly little commonality and precision in defining what it actually is. From the discussion, heavy on form but light on substance, one might conclude that culture functions a bit like the weather: impacting everyone, influencing everything, and permeating the workplace ubiquitously and from a great height. The weather, of course, isn’t something you change. You can accept it, enjoy it, brace for it, or shelter from it – but you can’t do much else. Sadly, that’s how many employees, managers, and even leaders think about company culture – as something to be recognized, handled, and possibly complained about – and that’s about it. But it doesn't have to be that way.
