List

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June 11th, 2021

Management upside down: global is local, leadership goes grassroots, top is at the bottom and traditional management needs a retirement party

It is perhaps the Age of Inversion. The weights have gone the other way. Globalisation, big G, or small g, […]
June 10th, 2021

Can anybody dispel the mystery for me, please? Who are ‘they’?

These are commonly found uses of the expression ‘they’ within organizations. They won’t approve this They don’t get it They […]
June 9th, 2021

Full of Embassies: The company is not an Internal Diplomatic Service

People in organizations spend a lot of time representing somebody else or something else. It feels sometimes that the company […]
June 7th, 2021

Strong thinkers are critical thinkers. Critical thinking can be embedded in the culture.

Strong thinking and strong ideas are great. We need people to defend them, champion them and feel passionate about them. […]
June 5th, 2021

The 4 hats of leadership in the modern organization

The trouble with the talking about leadership is that we have made a big basket of it and thrown in […]
June 4th, 2021

Top Influencers 2, Top Leadership 1 (Hierarchical power in the organization is half of the ‘peer-to-peer’ power)

Let me share a piece of our own research that has just come up from the oven. In a 1200 […]
June 3rd, 2021

Corporate culture as a social movement

Large scale mobilization and alignment of people, united through common goals yet everybody is in different and diverse roles with […]
June 2nd, 2021

John Kotter’s 8 Step Change Management model is the best change model of the last Century. Why this is still alive in 2021 is beyond me.

John Kotter, Harvard Emeritus Professor and prolific author, has made a significant contribution to Leadership and Change for many years. […]
June 1st, 2021

Here is the good news: good values, translated into behaviours, are contagious

How do you make values live? Install them in a culture? Model 1: You preach them and preach them, and […]
May 31st, 2021

Change management theories have only interpreted the organizational world. The point, however, is to actually change it.

Since we all love conceptual frames, it is not surprising that in the area of ‘change management’ there are a […]
May 28th, 2021

Debunking the Myths of Employee Engagement: a land of ‘Emperors with No Clothes’. The six models.

Since employee engagement has become an industry in its own right, and is taking over a lot of air time, […]
May 26th, 2021

Confronted with dysfunctionality, reorganization as a solution must be the last resort, not the first

Most of our organizational problems are behavioural. Structural answers hardly solve behavioural problems. Amalgamating A and B because A and […]
May 25th, 2021

Some restructuring does not seem part of the solution. Bigger problems continue to appear. And now the Fire Brigade has a permanent seat in the Boardroom.

Stanislav Andreski ( 1919-2007) in his little big book Social Science as Sorcery, writing about the influence of the social […]
May 24th, 2021

What do these have in common? Designing organizations, aquariums and fish soup.

Commenting on the communist legacy, a soviet academic Oleg Bogomolov, who must have known a thing or two about things […]
May 21st, 2021

Organizational structures that (dis) aggregate by design

New organizations and old ones in the business of transforming themselves, would be better off learning by heart these two […]
May 20th, 2021

Redesigning the organization. This is the best time for an upgrade.

If you had the possibility of designing an ideal organizational structure or redesigning one that you already have, what would […]
May 19th, 2021

Listening is more than being silent. Learn to spot the listener and call out the ones who pretend.

There is a difference between listening and just waiting to speak. You can spot people doing either. Some people don’t […]
May 18th, 2021

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 […]
May 17th, 2021

Accountability holes? Desert spaces? Orphan ideas? Buy the tent, occupy the street.

Any organization has accountability holes, areas where nobody really owns the space. Sometimes these are true ‘grey areas’, sometimes are […]
May 14th, 2021

The moral choices of leadership, courtesy of Pedro, my taxi driver in Panama

I broke my antisocial tradition during taxi rides and started a conversation with my Panama driver. I asked him who […]