List

Collaboration

  • The collective as a bad sum. When collaboration becomes co-recreation and the sum is smaller than the parts.

    In my dealing with organizations of many sizes and shapes, cultures and geographies, I always find very fine individuals of […]

  • No more teams, please, we need to team-up.

    The prestigious publication ‘The Economist’ has published an article under the title ‘Team spirit. Businesses are embracing the idea of […]

  • All that must be spontaneous, must be engineered.

    OK, at least you a reading. Thanks. The organization is a network. Networks have emergent properties. Translation: things come up […]

  • 3 ways to use ‘Digital’ inside the organization. The trouble with wrong expectations.

    Model 1. The technology, for example in the form of digital platforms such as Enterprise Social Networks, ESN (Yammer type) […]

  • Leaders, Dealers and Dreamers.

    Leaders. They drive the agenda, the agenda is not driving them. They drive the agenda even when other people think […]

  • Possibly the most important tribe in the organization is The Brokers.

    Each large or not that large organization needs one. This tribe is composed of people who have a natural ability […]

  • ‘Us and them’, and ‘us with them’. From politics to day to day management, Identity is a hot topic. And I am going to elevate the confusion to a higher level.

    Field notes: Reflections on ‘us and them’. Sometimes a rejection of something makes its alternative appealing even if that alternative […]

  • Collaborating across borders needs one thing: borders

    There is a romantic view of the organization that sees it completely borderless, inside and outside. Inside, this view says, […]

  • Common people doing uncommon things together: a plain language definition of the organization.

    Peter Drucker put it in his own style: ‘No organization can depend on genius; the supply is always scarce and […]

  • The 6 stages of Management Teams. The Origin and Evolution of these Species in one page.

    Stage 1: The Accidental Management team. The team is composed by whoever reports to the top. You are in that […]

  • The best organizational model is the one that has more than one under the roof

    Command and control management has less and less friends, and it’s quite terminally ill as well. The heirs are fighting […]

  • 3 self-sabotage 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 […]

  • Management is analogue. Communication is digital. Have two desks.

    A recent book by ex-Microsoft researcher and now MIT prof Kentaro Toyama (Geek Heresy, 20015) is not precisely novel on […]

  • The Open Plan Office may be a prison with invisible hanging posters: ‘You will collaborate’

    Who needs walls when we have screens? There is open plan and open plan. Open plan with Dilbert cubicles is […]

  • The ‘initiative’ often lets personal commitment off the hook

    ‘For every problem, the Victorians have a building’. For every idea that we need to carry forward, we invent an […]

  • From ‘us and them’ to ‘us with them’. Don’t kill the ‘us’ on behalf of a fictitious ‘global’.

    I sometimes think that many global ‘one company’ initiatives are missing the point. The intentions are good: ‘look, we are […]

  • Good silos, bad silos is like good cholesterol and bad cholesterol

    It could be argued that ‘silos’ are part of the human condition and group interaction, and Chris Rodgers (Informal Coalitions) […]

  • Some companies are run as a Permanent Focus Group

    In some organizations, daily life and the day to day meetings feel like a Permanent Focus Group. People spend their […]

  • Our real worlds and their avatars: management beware.

    In the words of a pioneer of Psychology, we’d be better off grabbing the reality of humanity for what it […]

  • The ‘Working from home’, distracting discussion.

    Is working from home ‘a matter of trust’? The Guardian supplement on ‘Top Employers Uk’ (28 February 2015) says so. […]

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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 […]