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15 random organizational irritations and inconvenient truths

 July 13, 2020 |  Building Remarkable Organizations, Corporate pathologies, Critical Thinking, Leadership |  Get Daily Thoughts by Email |  Email This!
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  1. Bottom up is not more (of the same) workshops but at the bottom of the organization. Changing the geography of top down does not make it bottom up.
  2. Large scale interventions are not small scale ones multiplied hundred times. Top down cascaded down of leadership events is not collective leadership of the entire organization. It’s lots and lots of leadership events.
  3. Coaching, team development, individual leadership development, are not scalable. You can’t coach the entire organization on, say, cultural change.
  4. Shock and awe communication campaigns de-scale quickly, they do not scale up.
  5. Individual and Cognitive Psychology have not heard of Network Sciences.
  6. Revolutions don’t start in classrooms.
  7. The best way to start a social movement (in the organization) is somebody starts a social movement.
  8. Cultures are not created  by training.
  9. An enlightened and committed leadership team does not guarantee an enlightened and committed organization.
  10. A poor leadership guarantees permission to get away with murder downstream.
  11. Don’t tell me your title, show me your Outlook calendar.
  12. People don’t come to the car park wondering how the CEO will behave today.
  13. I trust ‘people like me’ in the organization (as I trust patients like me [as in website], consumers like me, or mums like me).
  14. Engagement, pride, happiness, are outputs, not inputs. You can’t inject them in the organization. You create the conditions for them.
  15. Above all, don’t hire people who have all the answers. They are disqualified for any job.

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