List

Building Remarkable Organizations

  • Memo: Permission never required, so don’t ask

    I read a while ago this story. Within the highly structured and hierarchical (by design) Catholic church, a Religious Order […]

  • A new word for corporate life: de-corporatization

    In my world, ‘corporate’ is synonymous with big structure, big processes and big systems. Of course, it is not its […]

  • Pope Francis’ description of the 15 diseases of the Catholic Church administration apparatus (Curia) says a lot about the universal traps of human organizations

    Pope Francis, spiritual leader to 1.2 billion people, likes ‘to call a cat a cat’. He has gained a world […]

  • 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 […]

  • Confronted with dysfunctionality, reorganization as a solution must be the last resort, not the first

    Most of our organizational problems are behavioural. Structural answers hardly solve behavioural problems. Amalgamating A and B because A and […]

  • What do these have in common? Designing organizations, aquariums and fish soup.

    Commenting on the communist legacy, a soviet academic Oleg Bogomolov, who must have known a thing or two about things […]

  • Organizational structures that (dis) aggregate by design

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

  • 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, […]

  • FAQs to myself (about organizational life)

    In my work as Organization Architect, I have dealt with clients of many sizes, shapes and colours over the years. […]

  • A ‘culture of X’ is not the same as a culture of ‘training on X’. Safety is a good example.

    Organizations have traditionally used a three-legged approach to creating a ‘culture’: Communications, training and compliance. None of those in isolation […]

  • 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 […]

  • A mobilizing platform is the human operating system of the company. You need to install your HOS.

    I said previously that large scale mobilization of people (AKA social movements, AKA company culture) needs a platform. They don’t […]

  • The corporate mille-feuille. Layers of initiatives don’t touch each other

    In a large company, what do a leadership development, a culture change and a business integration programme typically have in […]

  • The alternative post-mortem of failed change programmes. (2 of 5): It was fireworks and corporate flash mobs

    Second instalment in the uncovering of truths via a reverse engineering of the failure of change and transformation programmes. Many […]

  • The impact of unintended/extended positive consequences of organizational initiatives maybe bigger than the individual desired outcomes. So who sees them?

    ‘Co-benefit’ is a term broadly used in the Climate Change movement to explain the unintended/extended consequences of actions beyond an […]

  • Agree conceptually on values, then abandon the labels as fast as you can and focus on their behavioural translation

    In my Daily Thought back in September, I suggested that leadership competence-based systems may be better at providing a language […]

  • The pharma company that forgot to display its purpose

    A few years ago, I was in the lobby of a global pharma company waiting for my appointment. I sat […]

  • A small company is not a big company in small. In the growth from small to big, the trouble is in the middle.

    Small, sometimes entrepreneurial companies (small and entrepreneurial are not the same) enjoy ways of working that are fit for their […]

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

    My very good client BTG plc created a habit of getting leadership teams together to race boats for a day, […]

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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 […]