List

To search my website, please use the form below.

  Daily Thoughts

March 6th, 2015

I dread ‘robust’ and ‘sustainable’ cultures.

Culture is a double-edge sword. On one hand, it can host the most beautiful and sophisticate developments, enhance people’s life, […]

March 5th, 2015

Two way in vivo fertilization Human Resources – Business. The 2015 Protocol.

I remember the time when I was working in Pharmaceuticals (how sad is to start a sentence with ‘I remember […]

March 4th, 2015

Daily Thoughts is one year old today! Blow the candle with me.

Today, exactly one year ago, I started the Daily Thoughts. Published every day at 08:00 am GMT in my personal […]

March 3rd, 2015

“If you want to revenge someone, prepare two graves”. On leadership and digging.

This is one of the many pearls of wisdom from Confucius.  Your revenge may kill the adversary but a bit […]

March 2nd, 2015

Community Organizing 1, Harvard MBA nil.

When Uber, the ride-on-demand business growing across the world, had a problem, didn’t call management consultants, but a political campaigner/social […]

March 1st, 2015

‘A man can put up with almost any how if he has a why’

That was Nietzsche on change management! It goes to the core of the issue of how we all try to […]

February 28th, 2015

The hour of Radical Management Thinking. The lines are open.

The hour has come. Radical is the word. From the Latin, radix, it means root. We need to get to […]

February 27th, 2015

Critical Thinking self-test. A 10 point health check for your organization, and yourself

If any of these are a good picture of your organization, you need to put ‘critical thinking’ in the water […]

February 26th, 2015

Management (Education) as Sorcery? Just plagiarizing a dead professor.

Over the years, I have learnt not to trust any expert who starts a paragraph with ‘Research shows that…’ It […]

February 25th, 2015

Standing out, standing for, sameness and differentiation. Just thinking aloud

Let me elevate the question of ‘differentiation’ to a higher level. Product differentiation? Sure. How different is different, that is […]

February 24th, 2015

My friends, the monks, secret weapon: the asterisk. I want 2015 Leadership with tons of them.

My best friends are monks of the type that don’t talk much. So we don’t talk much. I visit them […]

February 23rd, 2015

Trivialising management recipes won’t get us anywhere. ‘Having fun’ comes at the top of the ridiculous. Referring to the NHS is ludicrous.

A piece in The Guardian by Christina Patterson (‘writer and broadcaster’) entitled ‘The secret to an effective workforce is fun’ […]

February 22nd, 2015

But what do they think? What do they want us to do? Why don’t they just tell us?

In my consulting work, it is incredibly frequent to see people stuck with a question: ‘but what to they want […]

February 21st, 2015

Scott Adams/Dilbert thinks that ‘passion’ in business success is overrated. He has a point. ‘Passion’ is a beautiful trap.

I wrote yesterday that the success formula is ‘ Be passionate but buy the damned ticket’. I have more on […]

February 20th, 2015

God’s answer to somebody who complained to Him that he did not win the lottery: ‘Buy that damned ticket!’ (Passionate people, take notice)

As Woody Allen said, showing up is 80% of  life. The bookshelves, digital or otherwise, are full of ‘How-To-Succeed-In’ stuff. […]

February 19th, 2015

The only Employee Questionnaire you’ll ever need. Copyright policy: please use, copy, distribute, forward, reuse.

This is my brand new, 10 questions, Employee Engagement/Satisfaction/Climate/All-in-One Survey, or TCP 10. That’s right, this is ‘The Chalfont Project […]

February 18th, 2015

Employee Engagement Surveys: Be careful what you ask for, you might get it.

There are two opposite and wrong reactions to Employee (engagement/satisfaction) surveys. In one end, there is the ‘ignore the findings’. […]

February 17th, 2015

HR competence systems need two things: a diet, and a dose of honesty

Medium and big organizations tend to use a competence system that segments people by grades and by degree of competence. […]

February 16th, 2015

Seeking unpredictable answers.

We spend too much time seeking predictable answers. They are not necessarily bad. If I work with Peter and Paul […]

February 15th, 2015

Power creates serious optical problems. It makes you blind. It does it in the family, in the church, in the street, in the bedroom and the boardroom

In the press these days there is the account of the trial in Lille of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, (also known as […]