List

Building Remarkable Organizations

  • Archaeologists usually don’t build houses. We have lots of archaeologists on the payroll

    Over years of consulting, I have realised that the best leaders I know, never talk about their previous companies, what […]

  • Bold leadership pays off. It can also be killed by those who are highly paid to be professionally afraid

    Years ago, I persuaded a pharmaceutical client to make three bold moves in one: (1)   To create a New Product […]

  • Leadership scaffolding. Let’s try this mental model

    Leadership can be taught, of course, but not in the same way as teaching how to drive a car or […]

  • Sustainable? Competitive advantage or disadvantage?

    There was a time, not long ago, when people got fed up with ‘change programmes’ that faded at the speed […]

  • Your mental frame, as defined by words, will dictate your actions. Even your values. Words are dictators.

    The purpose of the organization is… The objectives of the strategy are… The reason why we have restructured is… From […]

  • The answer to Trumpism: get involved, call out the in-human, the non-truth. Start inside the organization.

    When I first read Saul Alinsky’s ‘Rules for Radicals’ a long time ago, I was impacted by a little paragraph […]

  • News headlines about you three years from now. Try this in a group. Agree. Then start seducing people. (Leadership for dummies like me?)

    Where are we going? That’s a simple question in leadership, from followers to leaders. Forgive me this non-sophisticated approach to […]

  • Irrelevance, survival, average, good, or ahead of the game? Buying tickets for the latter.

    I’ve been in front of 2000 people in Ecuador last week. Out of 8000, all belonging to a family owned […]

  • What kind of association? What you think you are, where others see you, and where you may end up

    This is my non-scientific classification of forms of ‘collective action’ (association and collaboration for a purpose, in general) and how […]

  • Thinking leadership in terms of legacy. There will be one

    Big L, small l, legacy is the long term outcome of leadership. There will be legacy. You’re better off shaping […]

  • When your organization not only has good leadership but is a Leadership Lab, a live School for Leaders, we are talking serious cutting edge.

    An organization is super rich in leadership and becomes a Leadership Lab, a School of Leaders, if it has three […]

  • Happiness in the organization is an outcome not an input. Prescribing happiness is a behavioural nonsense.

    You can’t inject happiness in the organization. You can’t put happiness capsules in the water supply. You can’t prescribe happiness, […]

  • 4 types of company cultures and their journeys under internal or external pressures. Stealing from Network Theory

    The Robust Culture: the culture handles well internal faults and external stress. There may be internal gaps (skills, unfilled positions, […]

  • The secret of success revealed. The PC answer is passion. The prosaic truth is hard work.

    I’ve written many times: passion is overrated. Of course I am pushing the envelop with this. Passion is the fuel. […]

  • Some company cultures are works of fiction. Some leadership teams ‘harrypotter’ a narrative that nobody else recognizes.

    The description of some company cultures by their leaders may sound like a work of fiction by people inside. I […]

  • For any organizational solution, we bring along extra problems. The system always kicks back.

    Attention re-structuralists, strategists and people about to be sold a multi-million reorganization solution that will solve all those nasty problems […]

  • Listen, people. I’ve got good news! The company is now fully prepared for the past

    This is my rephrasing of ‘The army is now fully prepared for the previous war’, inspired by John Gall, in […]

  • 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 […]

  • 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 […]

  • 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 […]

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      Daily Thoughts

    September 27th, 2023

    Redefining Talent Wealth

    The war on talent McKinsey consultants started it with a book of the same title. By focusing on what it […]
    September 8th, 2023

    What I Learnt From The Monks: A Little Anthropology Of Leadership And Space On One Page

    My friends, monks of a Benedictine monastery in the Highlands, Scotland, spend most of the time in silence. I mean, […]
    August 23rd, 2023

    Can We Rescue DEI From Its Trap (The Label)?

    Most of the problems and challenges in organizations, together with most of the solutions, are behavioural in nature. It’s about […]
    August 10th, 2023

    Restructuring to force collaboration, is likely to create more anxiety than collaboration. Structural solutions for behavioural problems hardly work.

    Sometimes restructuring is done with the intention of solving a collaboration problem. ´A people´ don’t talk to ´B people´; if […]
    July 18th, 2023

    The ‘Impossible To Disagree With’ School Of Management

    ‘Good leaders have empathy, respect employees and set the example. If you want to change things, you need to have […]
    June 29th, 2023

    Large scale change is not small scale change repeated many times. Small wins repeated are lots of small wins.

    Large scale change, as a series of cascading small scale interventions (often under the philosophy of ‘small wins’) has dominated […]
    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 […]