List

Backstage Leadership

  • Culture change is not long and difficult. But we make it so…

    I suppose the question is how long is long and how difficult is difficult? In general, business and organizational consulting have […]

  • A Cheat Sheet To Create A Social Movement Tip = to shape organizational culture since both are the same.

    Mobilizing people. This is another of the Holy Grails (how many have I said we have?) in management. Whether you […]

  • Lead Via Peer-To-Peer Networks – If you don’t lead via peer-to-peer networks, you’re only driving your car in first gear.

    Peer-to-peer work, transversal, spontaneous or not, collaboration, peer-to-peer influence, peer-to-peer activities of Viral Change™ champions or activists, all of this is the […]

  • 3 Self-Sabotaging Mechanisms in Organizations

    Organizations, like organisms, have embedded mechanisms of survival, of growth and also of self-sabotage. These are 3 self-sabotage systems to […]

  • What are the collective leadership capabilities?

    So, I’m back. But in a different format. Rather than daily thoughts, I will now share with you a regular […]

  • What people think and what people say are occasionally connected. Being aware of this may be lifesaving.

    ‘Daily Thoughts’ is paused, to assess its value and its next  ‘presentation of  life’. Bear with us. In the meantime, […]

  • 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 […]

  • Is leadership so elusive or only in the hands of academics?

    A publication I once received around the Mighty Davos meeting portrays the views of five expert academics on the topic […]

  • A heroic culture is a sick culture. If the company can only be run on heroic mode, call the doctor. But heroes, individually, are welcome.

    We all know, and have, some heroes in our organizations. People who jump in, solve problems, make themselves available, walk […]

  • Monochrome cultures (and their Royal Courts)

    Possibility is perhaps the most beautiful word in management. There are organizations in which possibilities seem exhausted, work is an […]

  • 12 simple rules of social change, organizational (culture) or societal (2/2)

    Continuing my revised 12 laws of social change at a scale. Very simple laws apply to any large scale change including the […]

  • 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 do they want us […]

  • The unsaid and unsayable are at the deeper layers of culture

    When trying to understand a culture, there will be plenty of visible things to look at, to hear and to […]

  • Lose control, to gain more control: Starting the Control Diet

    I said in yesterday’s Daily Thought that we needed to grab the (management) Paradox of Control. The more we lose […]

  • Lose control, to gain more control: The paradox and the symptoms

    The more ‘command-and-control’ you practice, the less control you actually have and the more you’ll need to command. In today’s […]

  • Collective Leadership: Two Acid Tests

    THIS THURSDAY – don’t miss our final live webinar in the ‘A Better Way’ series, when Mark Storm and I […]

  • One disruptive culture shift, five outcomes. At least. The 30/30 to 3/3 ‘unreasonable shift’.

    Imagine this goal. Let’s shift from 30 people making a decision in 30 days, to 3 people making the same […]

  • 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, […]

  • 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 […]

  • 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 […]

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      Daily Thoughts

    June 6th, 2023

    Culture change is not long and difficult. But we make it so…

    I suppose the question is how long is long and how difficult is difficult? In general, business and organizational consulting have […]
    May 19th, 2023

    Value is an overused term in business and, as such, it’s becoming meaningless

    Value, as usually used, means transactional monetary value. Usually it doesn’t mean intrinsic value, or value per se. For example, […]
    May 4th, 2023

    The importance of ‘critical thinking.’ Your own critical thinking is more effective at making your workplace better than any generic employee survey.

    Build your own Employee Engagement argument for free. You can’t go wrong. Here are three baskets full of concepts: Basket […]
    April 21st, 2023

    ´Busy-Ness’ Is A Trap

    I went to a big conference where I was introduced by the chairman like this: “Welcome everybody. Lovely to have […]
    April 14th, 2023

    Training and culture change. The love affair that ends in tears.

    It seems to be very hard for people to get away from the idea that if we just put individuals […]
    April 11th, 2023

    Teamocracies and Networkracies have different citizens: in-Habitants in team-work, riders in net-work

    The old view of the organization is something close to the old concept of a medieval city, where citizenship was […]
    April 5th, 2023

    3 Ways To Get Approval From Your CEO Or Your Leadership Team

    Way number 1: My team has developed these three options, A, B and C. Which one do you want us […]
    March 29th, 2023

    A Cheat Sheet To Create A Social Movement Tip = to shape organizational culture since both are the same.

    Mobilizing people. This is another of the Holy Grails (how many have I said we have?) in management. Whether you […]
    March 16th, 2023

    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 supply.

    Test yourself, and your organization. Do any of these apply? Doing lots, too fast without thinking. High adrenaline, not sure […]
    March 9th, 2023

    A culture of safety or a culture of training in safety?

    Cultures are created by behaviours becoming the norm. Safety is at the core of many industries. Significant budgets are allocated […]
    March 2nd, 2023

    Empowerment is an output. If you can visualize it, you can craft it.

    The real question is, what do you want to see happening so that you can say ‘people are empowered’? Employee […]
    February 24th, 2023

    A simple question will jumpstart your organization into change. It will also save you from months of pain spent reorganizing your people and teams.

    The following line will short-cut months of (building) ‘alignment’, integration, reorganization, team building, coalition building, and any situation in which Peter, […]
    February 20th, 2023

    Lead Via Peer-To-Peer Networks – If you don’t lead via peer-to-peer networks, you’re only driving your car in first gear.

    Peer-to-peer work, transversal, spontaneous or not, collaboration, peer-to-peer influence, peer-to-peer activities of Viral Change™ champions or activists, all of this is the […]
    February 7th, 2023

    Write a script, not a strategic plan

    If you care about the journey and the place, you need a story. If you have a good, compelling one, […]
    January 26th, 2023

    3 self-sabotaging mechanisms in organizations

    Organizations, like organisms, have embedded mechanisms of survival, of growth and also of self-sabotage. These are 3 self-sabotage systems to […]
    January 10th, 2023

    Who should be involved in culture change? All inclusive versus going where the energy is.

    Many times, in my consulting work, I find myself facing a dilemma: Do I involve many people on the client’s […]
    December 23rd, 2022

    Tell what won’t change – Introducing 1 of my 40 rules of change

    In any change programme that any organization wants to start, they will start by thinking of the things that they […]
    December 16th, 2022

    Scale It – Introducing 1 of my 40 rules of change

    When creating effective change in any organization, there are 40 rules that, in my experience, are the key between success […]
    December 5th, 2022

    Assets & Strengths Base – Introducing 1 of my 40 rules of change

    For more than 30 years I have been involved in ‘change’ in organizations. Again and again, some fundamental principles, and often […]
    November 25th, 2022

    Campaign It… is 1 of my 40 rules of change

    When you filter out the noise, when you try to extract the core, the fundamentals, those ‘universal rules’ of change […]
    October 31st, 2022

    Hybrid or not hybrid? That’s not the question…

    Culture is the new workplace If you want to have a conversation about the future of work, the nature of […]
    October 24th, 2022

    ‘Powered by Viral Change™’: A Social Transformation Platform for the organization of the 21st Century

    When we started to work on Viral Change™, as a way to create large scale behavioural and cultural change, and […]
    October 14th, 2022

    Corporate tribes, intellectual ghettos and open window policies

    We talk a lot about silos in organizations usually in the context of Business Units or divisions. But these are not […]
    October 7th, 2022

    Peer Networks are the strongest force of action inside the organization

    Peer-to-peer works, transversal, spontaneous or not, collaboration, peer-to-peer influence, peer-to-peer activities of Viral Change™ champions or activists, all of this is […]
    September 30th, 2022

    Change that doesn’t deliver change-ability is a waste

    The traditional model of change is the one I call ‘destination’ type, that is, how to go from A to […]
    September 23rd, 2022

    Company structures: aggregate and disaggregate

    New organizations, and old ones in the business of transforming themselves, would be better off learning by heart these two […]
    September 15th, 2022

    3 Self-Sabotaging Mechanisms in Organizations

    Organizations, like organisms, have embedded mechanisms of survival, of growth and also of self-sabotage. These are 3 self-sabotage systems to […]
    September 2nd, 2022

    The best organizational model is to have more than one under the same roof

    Command and control management has fewer friends, and it’s quite terminally ill as well. The heirs are fighting for a piece […]
    August 26th, 2022

    Unprecedented Times? Sure. Let’s Move On Please.

    Somewhere in the post-Covid peak, I promised myself that I wasn’t going to pay attention anymore to anything that starts with […]
    August 19th, 2022

    Engagement, Empowerment and Ownership Culture Meet at One Single Point. Obvious, Simple and Incredibly Forgotten

    Employee engagement efforts, ownership values and empowerment behaviours must meet at one point. It’s simple, not terribly controversial, based upon […]