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  Daily Thoughts

July 6th, 2015

Measurement: the Dogma. Here are 10 critical thinking principles.

The following are not the same: What you want to measure What you need to measure What you have been […]
July 5th, 2015

Stickiness: the highest, inconvenient management challenge.

  Managers are good at messaging and communicating. Ok, this is a benevolent assessment but let’s assume this. Also, OK […]
July 4th, 2015

The 4 leadership hats in the modern organization.

The trouble with the talking about leadership is that we have made a big basket of it, and thrown in […]
July 3rd, 2015

If you rate me, I’ll rate you

We rate hotels and restaurants in Tripadvisor, we now can rate doctors and teachers, and we rate lots of services […]
July 2nd, 2015

The company that gets better and better after disruption, disorder or chaos.

Nassim Taleb Antifragile concept is perhaps one of the most attractive frames (conceptual, philosophical, practical) we have had recently. By […]
July 1st, 2015

What do you do in a room full of smoke? Apply the same to mental pollution.

Open the windows. Ok, it’s not your room, so you can’t. Don’t get in. Avoid the room. If you need […]
June 30th, 2015

Most likely, the answers are in the room

At the beginning of our Viral Change™ programmes, moons ago, we were worried about a few things. One in particular […]
June 29th, 2015

The cost of doing something versus the cost of not doing it. The second half is often missing.

Confronted with options and strategies, the cost of doing things is very often the first thing that comes to our […]
June 28th, 2015

Chose your problems, before they chose you. We never solve problems; it’s a question of working on the best trade off.

Since we never solve problems completely, only make tradeoffs between them, it would be good to choose problems before they […]
June 27th, 2015

‘Let’s see what that data says’. The Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy lives on.

Probably we will never be short of data anymore. We even have now Big Data, with big capitals, as a […]
June 26th, 2015

Time to retire the ‘HR Business Partner’ concept, if HR wants to ever make it to the high table.

The Business Partner concept or model was developed particularly for HR by Ulrich and Brockbank in 2005 to stress the […]
June 25th, 2015

Darling, what are your expectations today? Or why do we talk Martian in business?

There is a ‘meeting expectations’ cult in business. It has created its own concept of (customer) services: meet customer expectations, […]
June 24th, 2015

Games or Rituals? Anthropology inside the company has valuable things to say.

Organizational anthropology sounds like a grandiose academic affair. You may imagine the anthropologists armed with notebooks and cameras capturing the […]
June 23rd, 2015

Manage the inevitable, lead the unpredictable, allow yourself to do both

I’ve written several times about the tired distinction between management and leadership. It had its logic and purpose, and made […]
June 22nd, 2015

William Hague and Angeline Jolie 5 million rape Summit was an expensive flash mob

Data obtained by newspapers in the UK has shown that a summit against rape in war zones held in London […]
June 21st, 2015

I challenge you with this quiz, when applied to your own organization.

There are about 200 people in the organization. But 10 of them at the top are very powerful. In fact, […]
June 20th, 2015

The ‘initiative’ often lets personal commitment off the hook

‘For every problem, the Victorians have a building’. For every idea that we need to carry forward, we invent an […]
June 19th, 2015

I want to import this ‘act of kindness’ into business life

I know of a brilliant medical doctor who, in front of a worried patient, perhaps with some imaginary worries, perhaps […]
June 18th, 2015

Blasting middle management is a sign of leadership incompetence

For years, middle management has been targeted by executives, business leaders, business gurus and so called ‘change experts’ as the […]
June 17th, 2015

From ‘us and them’ to ‘us with them’. Don’t kill the ‘us’ on behalf of a fictitious ‘global’.

I sometimes think that many global ‘one company’ initiatives are missing the point. The intentions are good: ‘look, we are […]