List

Change, Leadership and Society

  • Counter-fundamentalism secret weapon is yet to be deployed fully. Homo Sapiens drops bombs. Homo Imitans changes minds.

    The best way to help dysfunctional families to get out of their habits and become functional is not an army […]

  • ‘Change management’ forgotten statement: this will not change

    ‘Change management’ usually forgets a vital component: the things that don’t change or need to change, or, indeed, must not […]

  • Is technology transforming (management) life? Is it good or bad? Is this the best you can do with a question?

    Back from a conference on ‘technology and management’ (Drucker Forum, Vienna), I realise how futile some discussions on ‘technology’ are. […]

  • The ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’ school of Change Management.

    Amongst the beautiful poems that Constantine P. Cavafy (1863-1933) wrote, I have always found some which could go straight to […]

  • It may not be inevitable. It may be that people believe it is inevitable. Grab the script. Change the script.

    Scholars of social movements and also of all forms of radicalization processes agree that, quite constantly, there seems to be […]

  • ‘Nothing new under the sun’ ? Take off your sun glasses and stop the Valium

    Often you see people in organizations disillusioned with changes, considering themselves survivors of the yet another reorg, getting on with […]

  • We, ourselves are the biggest exporters of problems to the organizations we work for

    The great Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset wrote about the early 20th Century Spanish society as being ‘led by […]

  • 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 […]

  • The curious case of Castro and the Pope. Or maybe not.

    I wrote yesterday that magnetism should be incorporated to the category of Prize Winner in corporate cultures: ‘I want to […]

  • Pilot or pastor? From the No-nonsense Francis School of Leadership

    Pope Francis has done it again. I mean, his probably weekly plain English (well, Italian or Spanish) bit of nudging […]

  • The End of Management, not the end of managing. Here I go again.

    In the organization, ‘people mobilization’ is the name of the game It is the working title of one of my […]

  • Change management: Harvard, you have a problem

    I am picking on Harvard because John Kotter is prof Emeritus there and he has been the master of the […]

  • ‘What if it’s genuine?’ A disruptive question in a paranoid era when the assumption is deception.

    Politicians will lie, their messages will be spin, they can’t be trusted. Many are corrupt. Companies with progressive social initiatives […]

  • Lead in Poetry, manage in Prose.

    I am of course paraphrasing Mario Cuomo’s ‘You campaign in poetry; you govern in prose’. Cuomo (1932-2015) was an American […]

  • The moral choices of leadership, courtesy of Pedro, my taxi driver in Panama

    I broke my antisocial tradition in taxi rides and started a conversation with my Panama driver. I asked him who […]

  • 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 […]

  • Culture change is not long and difficult. This myth is self-perpetuated. This emperor has no clothes. The emperor is freezing.

    Alternative title: A plan longer than six months to see initial success , is not worth the money. I suppose […]

  • Organizing, mobilizing, engaging: Harvard Business School or 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue? My choice is clear

    The recent State of the Union address by US president Obama had, to distant and detached eyes such as mine, […]

  • One single behavior can create a revolution. It would work both, inside and outside the company.

    This is Elizabeth Warren, American Senator, ex Harvard professor, who is ‘not running for President’ (as most future runners say), […]

  • Big Banks have been fined again. A tiny fraction of the fines with the right behavioural change approach would change their cultures for ever.

    It seems like the Weekly News about Banks Bad Behaviour. This time about  big fines. ‘Between fines and legal costs, […]

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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 […]