List

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July 9th, 2021

All the roads lead to Rome, but mind the axle of the car

A friend of mine Carlos Orozco  uses this analogy. If you are driving a car and you have a puncture, you’ll try […]

July 8th, 2021

The unsaid and unsayable are at the deeper layers of culture

When trying to understand a culture, there will be plenty of visible things to look at, to hear and to […]

July 7th, 2021

The cult of issues. The culture in which airtime is dominated by problems and where navel-gazing is king

Some cultures a very introspective. In a healthy way. Some are pathologically introspective and spend a lot of time dissecting […]

July 6th, 2021

A tsunami of navel-gazing, force 11, is impacting business, society and politics. And individual identity.

I don’t like to sound gloomy, but, is the current self-centrism an epidemic of colossal proportions? Or, another way to […]

July 5th, 2021

Sharing thoughts, being carriers, and why there are no idiots anymore

I have described before the role of managers in many ways, often pointing to the risk of becoming ‘information traffic […]

July 2nd, 2021

Walking e-bays bearing second hand thoughts

We are pulled to conform to the group, to participate, to contribute, to say something. Nodding is not enough. Taking […]

July 1st, 2021

Where is home? A serious management question to employees

I am (in) IT, I work for X (company) I work for X (company), I am in IT These are […]

June 30th, 2021

20 reasons why I trust you

I trust you because I can say ‘I haven’t got a clue’ and you don’t think I am an idiot […]

June 29th, 2021

Preach your values all the time, when necessary use words

This is plagiarism, of course. I am stealing 13th Century Saint, Francis of Assisi’s  line: ‘Preach the Gospel all the […]

June 28th, 2021

Thesaurus – based value and behaviours systems are meaningless, exhausted and cheap

Let’s start somewhere else. What is the logic behind Listmania? Very often there isn’t one. But starting a note/blog/communication with […]

June 25th, 2021

Values don’t pre-exist, their behaviours do, then values are born, e.g. there is no such thing as kindness.

There is no such thing as kindness. Unless, and until, somebody does something to another human being who can feel […]

June 24th, 2021

Memo: Permission never required, so don’t ask

I read a while ago this story. Within the highly structured and hierarchical (by design) Catholic church, a Religious Order […]

June 23rd, 2021

A new word for corporate life: de-corporatization

In my world, ‘corporate’ is synonymous with big structure, big processes and big systems. Of course, it is not its […]

June 22nd, 2021

The minority tyranny in the organization

Nassim Taleb’s piece in Medium some time ago entitled The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority is one […]

June 21st, 2021

‘How can we make this fail?” is a more powerful question than its opposite

Accustomed as we are to creating plans to succeed on something, this may sound counterintuitive. Creating (serious) plans for failure […]

June 18th, 2021

Pope Francis’ description of the 15 diseases of the Catholic Church administration apparatus (Curia) says a lot about the universal traps of human organizations

Pope Francis, spiritual leader to 1.2 billion people, likes ‘to call a cat a cat’. He has gained a world […]

June 17th, 2021

Lose control, to gain more control: Starting the Control Diet

I said in yesterday’s Daily Thought that we needed to grab the (management) Paradox of Control. The more we lose […]

June 16th, 2021

Lose control, to gain more control: The paradox and the symptoms

The more ‘command-and-control’ you practice, the less control you actually have and the more you’ll need to command. In today’s […]

June 15th, 2021

Collective Leadership: Two Acid Tests

THIS THURSDAY – don’t miss our final live webinar in the ‘A Better Way’ series, when Mark Storm and I […]

June 14th, 2021

One disruptive culture shift, five outcomes. At least. The 30/30 to 3/3 ‘unreasonable shift’.

Imagine this goal. Let’s shift from 30 people making a decision in 30 days, to 3 people making the same […]