List

The Descartes legacy. The tyranny of bipolar thinking is always upon us.

One of us or one of them. Liberal or conservative. Top down or bottom up. Progressive or retrograde. Robust or fragile. Pro something or anti something. The world is an orange and it is cut in two halves. You must be on either side. But only one. [...]

And the frog said, next time buy yourself a thermometer

The old tale of ‘Boiling Frogs’ says that there are too basic ways to boil a frog. One, the frog is thrown into a boiling water pan. The frog jumps out one millisecond later. Close to first degree burns, but alive. And learns the lesson. The s[...]

4 types of company cultures and their journeys under internal or external pressures. Stealing from Network Theory.

The Robust Culture: the culture handles well internal faults and external stress. There may be internal gaps (skills, unfilled positions, imperfect process) or external pressure (unfavourable markets, unlucky launch) but the culture is relatively sta[...]

The minority tyranny in the organization

Nassim Taleb’s piece in Medium some time ago entitled The Most Intol[...]

How do people change their mind?

How do people change their mind? How can we influence people to change their minds? Well, any of us will bring ideas such as persuasion, manipulation, rational convincing, emotional appeal, and just about any other mechanism described in the influenc[...]

Change is social, doing it together, a praxis.

Extracts taken from my new book The Flipping Point. A flipping point in the trend for adopting absurd management ideas needs to be reached.

Forget robust and forget the tanks. It’s guerrilla and it's gazelle/cheetah/falcon in the project team.

Renounce adaptation, robustness and even ‘flexibility’ in favour of ‘taking any opportunity to do things you think you could not do before’ (Rahm Emanuel). And that means scary reinvent[...]

The company that gets better and better after disruption, disorder or chaos.

Nassim Taleb Antifragile concept is perhaps one of the most attractive frames (conceptual, philosophical, practical) we have had recently. By describing antifragile as the opposite to fragile, v[...]

I want companies with Post Traumatic Strength Disorder. Untreated.

Nassim Taleb’s Antifragile book has this subtitle: ‘Things that gain from disorder’. This is a model for the new organization and its new management. There are three [...]

COVID-19: From coping and adapting, to making things extraordinarily better. And surprising ourselves.

Nassim Taleb has written about ‘antifragile’ as the quality of ‘growing from disorder’. He says that the opposite to fragile is not robust, but antifragile. Translation: in [...]

I want companies with Post Traumatic Strength Disorder. Untreated.

Nasim Taleb’s Antifragile book has this subtitle: ‘Things that gain from disorder’. This is a model for the new organization and its new management. There are three t[...]

The Rolling Luggage Paradox

I owe this to Nassim Taleb (‘Fooled by Randomness’ (2007), ‘The Black Swan’ (2008), ‘Antifragile’ (2013). As a traveller of many years through New York airport, he recalls[...]

Engage to flip. (2 of 3). A magic threshold of number of people to shape a company culture? It’s actually complicated.

(A similar version of this post was released out of sync with it;'s part 1. Apologies for those who got it, bjut I will duplicate with some amendments, giving its importance) In part 1 I referred to sources that attempt to establish a threshold of[...]

Storytelling wins wars whilst everything else is fighting battles (and 3 of 3): event shocks coming to you, that may not feel like gifts.

In October 2013, a ship carrying migrants sank off the Italian island of Lampedusa. 300 people drowned. As The Guardian journalist Kenan Malik put it:  ‘It was not the first time that migrants had drowned in the Mediterranean. I[...]

Organisational culture shaping. Counterinsurgency field manual (2 of 5): Learn from mistakes (only if your manager does too).

Learning from mistakes, make mistakes, learn, it’s OK, mistakes are OK, we are human, if we did not make mistakes we would not innovate, in this company you can make mistakes, we learn, we learn, just make sure the mistake is proportionate and you [...]

Organizational Pathologies (and finally (!) 10 of 10): Empowerment as risk transfer (or the traffic of monkeys across the organization)

This is the last one in the series  of 10 Organizational Pathologies, and the longest write up. Sorry! Bear with me. Please challenge me on this assumption if you wish, but at least  follow my argument. Managers and leaders say that they empo[...]

Entrepreneurs on the payroll

Maybe, just maybe, we don’t  need ‘managers’ and ‘employees’, as in generals and troops. My strong bet is for a company of entrepreneurs on the payroll. Yes, they will need to be organised, yes they will need to follow principles, but t[...]

The conspiracy of the books in my library.

This is a straight quote from Nassim Taleb (Fooled by Randomness, Black Swan, Antifragile) A private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as[...]

The Rolling Luggage Paradox

I owe this to Nassim Taleb (‘Fooled by Randomness’ (2007), ‘The Black Swan’ (2008), ‘Antifragile’ (2013). As a traveller of many years through New York airport, he recalls[...]

The minority tyranny in the organization

Nassim Taleb’s piece in Medium about ten months ago entitled The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority is [...]

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  Daily Thoughts

September 27th, 2023

Redefining Talent Wealth

The war on talent McKinsey consultants started it with a book of the same title. By focusing on what it […]

September 8th, 2023

What I Learnt From The Monks: A Little Anthropology Of Leadership And Space On One Page

My friends, monks of a Benedictine monastery in the Highlands, Scotland, spend most of the time in silence. I mean, […]

August 23rd, 2023

Can We Rescue DEI From Its Trap (The Label)?

Most of the problems and challenges in organizations, together with most of the solutions, are behavioural in nature. It’s about […]

August 10th, 2023

Restructuring to force collaboration, is likely to create more anxiety than collaboration. Structural solutions for behavioural problems hardly work.

Sometimes restructuring is done with the intention of solving a collaboration problem. ´A people´ don’t talk to ´B people´; if […]

July 18th, 2023

The ‘Impossible To Disagree With’ School Of Management

‘Good leaders have empathy, respect employees and set the example. If you want to change things, you need to have […]

June 29th, 2023

Large scale change is not small scale change repeated many times. Small wins repeated are lots of small wins.

Large scale change, as a series of cascading small scale interventions (often under the philosophy of ‘small wins’) has dominated […]

June 6th, 2023

Culture change is not long and difficult. But we make it so…

I suppose the question is how long is long and how difficult is difficult? In general, business and organizational consulting have […]

May 19th, 2023

Value is an overused term in business and, as such, it’s becoming meaningless

Value, as usually used, means transactional monetary value. Usually it doesn’t mean intrinsic value, or value per se. For example, […]

May 4th, 2023

The importance of ‘critical thinking.’ Your own critical thinking is more effective at making your workplace better than any generic employee survey.

Build your own Employee Engagement argument for free. You can’t go wrong. Here are three baskets full of concepts: Basket […]

April 21st, 2023

´Busy-Ness’ Is A Trap

I went to a big conference where I was introduced by the chairman like this: “Welcome everybody. Lovely to have […]

April 14th, 2023

Training and culture change. The love affair that ends in tears.

It seems to be very hard for people to get away from the idea that if we just put individuals […]

April 11th, 2023

Teamocracies and Networkracies have different citizens: in-Habitants in team-work, riders in net-work

The old view of the organization is something close to the old concept of a medieval city, where citizenship was […]

April 5th, 2023

3 Ways To Get Approval From Your CEO Or Your Leadership Team

Way number 1: My team has developed these three options, A, B and C. Which one do you want us […]

March 29th, 2023

A Cheat Sheet To Create A Social Movement Tip = to shape organizational culture since both are the same.

Mobilizing people. This is another of the Holy Grails (how many have I said we have?) in management. Whether you […]

March 16th, 2023

Critical Thinking Self-Test: A 10 Point Health Check For Your Organization And Yourself. If any of these are a good picture of your organization, you need to put ‘critical thinking’ in the water supply.

Test yourself, and your organization. Do any of these apply? Doing lots, too fast without thinking. High adrenaline, not sure […]

March 9th, 2023

A culture of safety or a culture of training in safety?

Cultures are created by behaviours becoming the norm. Safety is at the core of many industries. Significant budgets are allocated […]

March 2nd, 2023

Empowerment is an output. If you can visualize it, you can craft it.

The real question is, what do you want to see happening so that you can say ‘people are empowered’? Employee […]

February 24th, 2023

A simple question will jumpstart your organization into change. It will also save you from months of pain spent reorganizing your people and teams.

The following line will short-cut months of (building) ‘alignment’, integration, reorganization, team building, coalition building, and any situation in which Peter, […]

February 20th, 2023

Lead Via Peer-To-Peer Networks – If you don’t lead via peer-to-peer networks, you’re only driving your car in first gear.

Peer-to-peer work, transversal, spontaneous or not, collaboration, peer-to-peer influence, peer-to-peer activities of Viral Change™ champions or activists, all of this is the […]

February 7th, 2023

Write a script, not a strategic plan

If you care about the journey and the place, you need a story. If you have a good, compelling one, […]

January 26th, 2023

3 self-sabotaging mechanisms in organizations

Organizations, like organisms, have embedded mechanisms of survival, of growth and also of self-sabotage. These are 3 self-sabotage systems to […]

January 10th, 2023

Who should be involved in culture change? All inclusive versus going where the energy is.

Many times, in my consulting work, I find myself facing a dilemma: Do I involve many people on the client’s […]

December 23rd, 2022

Tell what won’t change – Introducing 1 of my 40 rules of change

In any change programme that any organization wants to start, they will start by thinking of the things that they […]

December 16th, 2022

Scale It – Introducing 1 of my 40 rules of change

When creating effective change in any organization, there are 40 rules that, in my experience, are the key between success […]

December 5th, 2022

Assets & Strengths Base – Introducing 1 of my 40 rules of change

For more than 30 years I have been involved in ‘change’ in organizations. Again and again, some fundamental principles, and often […]

November 25th, 2022

Campaign It… is 1 of my 40 rules of change

When you filter out the noise, when you try to extract the core, the fundamentals, those ‘universal rules’ of change […]

October 31st, 2022

Hybrid or not hybrid? That’s not the question…

Culture is the new workplace If you want to have a conversation about the future of work, the nature of […]

October 24th, 2022

‘Powered by Viral Change™’: A Social Transformation Platform for the organization of the 21st Century

When we started to work on Viral Change™, as a way to create large scale behavioural and cultural change, and […]

October 14th, 2022

Corporate tribes, intellectual ghettos and open window policies

We talk a lot about silos in organizations usually in the context of Business Units or divisions. But these are not […]

October 7th, 2022

Peer Networks are the strongest force of action inside the organization

Peer-to-peer works, transversal, spontaneous or not, collaboration, peer-to-peer influence, peer-to-peer activities of Viral Change™ champions or activists, all of this is […]