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April 1st, 2015

Alibi to keep the status quo: ‘We are a regulated industry’

Amongst my clients I have a good representation of ‘regulated industries’ such as pharmaceuticals and financial services. I, myself, spent […]
March 31st, 2015

Nine basic contradictions in organizational life. Ignore at your peril.

Mastering healthy tension between them, or surrounding to an ‘impossible alignment’ is a choice for leaders and managers. The worse […]
March 30th, 2015

Science advances by a series of funerals. And some management practices are not feeling very well.

‘Science advances by a series of funerals’. This is how John Brockman, founder of The Edge, and editor of a […]
March 29th, 2015

Benchmarking as a health hazard. Cause of managers severe neck pain confirmed

Benchmarking is a rear-mirror strategy. It’s about catching up with something that has already happened. People who spend too much […]
March 28th, 2015

I gave money to one of two equally noble fundraising efforts. Why? I don’t’ like robots.

Same experience in two different trips with two different airlines. The cabin crew at some point launches a fundraising plea […]
March 27th, 2015

My 20 Rules of Leadership, ‘following extensive research’ (inside my mind)

These are my 20 Rules of Leadership. After extensive research… Oh, no, wait a minute. It is true field research. […]
March 26th, 2015

Change management: Harvard, you have a problem

I am picking on Harvard because John Kotter is prof Emeritus there and he has been the master of the […]
March 25th, 2015

Ad absurdum, but it may work

A man is walking alongside the road with a bag of rice and throwing rice outside the road. Another man […]
March 24th, 2015

The New York Times announces the new editor of The Guardian: ‘The Guardian Picks a Woman as its editor’

Congratulations to The New York Times for their headline announcing the new editor of The Guardian newspaper (UK/US/Global). We are […]
March 23rd, 2015

‘What if it’s genuine?’ A disruptive question in a paranoid era when the assumption is deception.

Politicians will lie, their messages will be spin, they can’t be trusted. Many are corrupt. Companies with progressive social initiatives […]
March 22nd, 2015

The company as a machine: a 90’s ideology still alive today.

This is number 2 in the list of Idea-Logic systems (ideologies) I have started to share yesterday (The Idea-Logic (ideology) […]
March 21st, 2015

The Idea-Logic (ideology) of a company. (1) Business as war.

Companies, as large or not so large social groupings, have an ideology ( a logic of ideas). It may not […]
March 20th, 2015

The slack advantage: ‘The minute the future becomes unpredictable, efficiency can become your enemy’.

I wrote before in these Daily Thoughts that a bit of inefficiency is very efficient An interview with Adam Pisoni, […]
March 19th, 2015

Managing by ‘the short term numbers’: what I learnt many years ago from a screen on the wall

A McKinsey article on Finance (2015) quotes: As a result of their focus on short-term EPS, major companies often pass […]
March 18th, 2015

Lead in Poetry, manage in Prose.

I am of course paraphrasing Mario Cuomo’s ‘You campaign in poetry; you govern in prose’. Cuomo (1932-2015) was an American […]
March 17th, 2015

20 years of experience, or 1 year of experience repeated 20 times?

It was a cruel joke form the times of Re-engineering. ‘Here it goes Joe’, started the joke. Then the quote: […]
March 16th, 2015

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

I broke my antisocial tradition in taxi rides and started a conversation with my Panama driver. I asked him who […]
March 15th, 2015

Articulating your core belief system, plus finding your ‘Space in the world’. The re-framing of the company steering wheel (4 and 5 of 5)

We have been exploring briefly in the last days the Steering system of the company under the formula: (1) Space […]
March 12th, 2015

Beyond mission and vision …and the rest. Reframing the company steering system in 2015. (1 of 5)

Many companies operate under some sort of ‘Mission and Vision’ framework, often also accompanied, or preceded, by a statement of […]
March 11th, 2015

Since anything can be translated into numbers, the possibilities of being fooled are immense.

The late Stanislav Andreski (1919-2007) British Professor of Social Sciences, in one of his vintage passages in ‘Social Sciences as […]