List

Change, Leadership and Society

  • Competition glorified: you are not a student, employee or citizen, you are a contestant.

    I have not counted the number of TV shows, either side of the Atlantic, that are based on individual competition, […]

  • 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 […]

  • Corporate Change is Corporate Rafting. And Heraclitus knew a thing or two about rivers (tip: change is not ‘created’)

    Heraclitus (535 BCE) was probably the father of change management. Two quotes: ‘There is nothing permanent except change’. ‘No man ever […]

  • And the frog said, next time buy yourself a thermometer

    The old tale of ‘Boiling Frogs’ says that there are too basic ways to boil a frog. One, the frog […]

  • The Disruption Religion misses the point: what will not change, and how we can capitalise on it. (2 of 2)

    In the previous Daily Thought I shared the simple idea that change management approaches often miss a big elephant in the […]

  • Change management’s most important announcement: this will not change

    The change management industry has traditionally missed a big elephant in the room: in times of change, what is actually […]

  • Articulating your core belief system, plus finding your ‘Space in the world’. The re-framing of the company steering wheel (4 and 5 of 5)

    We have been exploring briefly in the last days the Steering system of the company under the formula: (1) Space […]

  • From Values to Non-negotiable Behaviours. Continuing the reframing of the company steering system. (3 of 5)

    The trouble with value systems is that, very often, they have no proper translation into pragmatic and visible expectations that […]

  • Beyond mission and vision …and the rest. Reframing the company steering system in 2021. (1 of 5)

    Many companies operate under some sort of ‘Mission and Vision’ framework, often also accompanied, or preceded, by a statement of […]

  • ‘We are building’ vs. ‘We are solving’. One shapes your future, the other fixes the past.

    Facts: abysmal sales in the supermarket chain, strong competitor activity, decreased customer loyalty. Guess what, new CEO. Analysis: old fashion […]

  • 10 reasons why you should scrap annual performance appraisals. Pick one.

    1: The ‘annual’ measurement is artificial. It works for budgets and accountants but not for much more. If a project […]

  • The Negative Inventory Manager is a toxic manager, an organizational health hazard.

    There is a type of manager/leader who masters the art of listing what you don’t have.  We don’t have the […]

  • 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, […]

  • 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 his […]

  • They changed, they did well, because they were ready for it’.

    This piece of conventional wisdom is almost never true. That ‘they were ready’ is very often a posterity rationalization. Most […]

  • No hiding leadership: ‘We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. We are the change that we seek’

    I often use lines from some of Obama’s speeches, to ask leaders about their sense of destiny, small d or […]

  • For every ‘I have a dream’, there are thousands of ‘are you serious?’

    For every community struggling to achieve something, and deciding to launch some form of collective action; for every minority that […]

  • ‘Never try to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and it annoys the pig’

    This quote is from Robert Anson Heinlein (1907-1988), American science fiction writer, who was famous for his quotes. This one […]

  • The Lego and the Jigsaw: two ways to build an organization

    In the previous Daily Thoughts posting, I said that successful growth contains the seeds of its failure. Managing the organizational complexity […]

  • Yes, there is a new workplace now. It’s called culture.

    If you want to have a conversation about the future of work, the nature of work, the post-pandemic work, the […]

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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 […]