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  Daily Thoughts

July 16th, 2016

In management of change, as in leadership of organizations, ‘every day is Election Day’

‘Everyday is Election Day’ is an expression used in political campaigning and widely used in the masterful Obama campaigns. The […]

July 15th, 2016

Human behaviour laws are unfair. Positive or negative consequences are disproportionate to the causes. Get used to it as leader.

An old patient was concerned about her hair. A nurse came in at 7 am to put colour in her […]

July 14th, 2016

The ‘operating system’ of the company shapes people’s behaviours and this may take over ‘culture’

We influence and indeed shape the way we do things at work, but these ways also shape us at the […]

July 13th, 2016

The Yellow Life jacket Communication Problem in organizations. May I have your attention, please.

If any business executive, head of communications function, HR messenger or communications agency for that matter, has any doubt about […]

July 12th, 2016

Shifting the narrative: one of the finest roles of leadership

One of the fundamental roles of leadership is to frame the narrative of the organization. This is easy to say […]

July 11th, 2016

My 20 Rules of Leadership

My 20 RULES OF LEADERSHIP Earn credibility all the time. Stocks deplete easily. Act as if you did not have […]

July 10th, 2016

What they don’t teach you in Business Schools about financial management: managing resources you don’t own or control.

My kingdom, my budget, my P&L, my operating expenses, my pot of money. Traditional financial management is about the efficacy […]

July 9th, 2016

The 19th Century Great Man Theory of history is still well alive in our understanding of leadership in organizations.

My Daily Thought yesterday about the Blair’s Fundamental, Leadership Error has triggered a lot of comments in social media. Most […]

July 8th, 2016

Compelling narrative and truth are, of course, two different things. Leadership must make them inseparable

  For months now a picture of a pack of wolfs walking in the snow has been circulated in many […]

July 7th, 2016

The ‘Blair’s Fundamental Error’ of leadership (it’s not political)

In the day in which the Cilcot Inquiry on the war in Iraq has been finally presented in the UK, […]

July 6th, 2016

‘Every Corpse on Everest was once an extremely motivated person’

I don’t know where this comes from but it’s in posts and posters all over. It’s perhaps one of these […]

July 5th, 2016

Find your own performance recipe. Today, the life cycle of a Best Practice is a week

Organizational performance is unique. Cut and paste does not work. You need to find your own formula. Good to hear […]

July 4th, 2016

We are all HR. So, we’d better upgrade ourselves. A lot of HR is deja vu

HR is a function. Well, hardly one. It’s a supermarket that has in its shelves a variety of brands, from […]

July 3rd, 2016

No single discipline has the answer anymore. There is no escape. Read and re-skill like mad.

Whether you are sitting in HR, Organizational Development, or any other corporate function, or simply in a position of management […]

July 2nd, 2016

Creating a Gender and Race, Diversity and Inclusion programme? A culture of Diversity-Full-Stop will be your most powerful engine.

People creating ‘diversity and inclusion’ programmes often  have a hard time. The programme for the concert is brilliant, the music […]

June 30th, 2016

How to create collaboration? Parachute people in who collaborate a lot

Collaboration is behavioural, not a process or system. As a behaviour, it can’t be taught. It’s something that some people […]

June 29th, 2016

If you ask people for input they will expect you do something with it, not to disappear in limbo

That is the trouble of many well-intentioned ‘crowd-sourced’ rounds of input in the form of focus groups or similar. We […]

June 28th, 2016

Where are all these people coming from for the meeting? Their previous, unrelated meetings have the key for yours

“Priming’ is an old concept. It means you can influence events by exposing people to subtle messages, colours, perhaps emotions […]

June 27th, 2016

Imperfect data, imperfect instructions, low predictability, high trust: just a model for business (from boat racing)

My very good client BTG plc has created a habit of getting leadership teams together into racing boats for a […]

June 27th, 2016

The room was filled with smoke, no windows, I had to leave. The day I deleted my LinkedIn post for the first time

As I had spent the week, and to my own surprise, highly impacted by the Brexit results, I wrote a […]