List

Corporate anthropology

  • 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 […]

  • ‘Sceptical people and enemies of change need to be sidelined’. Really?

    We all have our share of ‘difficult people’. Conventional management of change has taught us that there is always going […]

  • Will the last employee in Command and Control Inc/Ltd/Plc/SA please turn off the lights? (But have a good lantern with you)

    The new, emerging organizations, many people would agree, are more collaborative, more leadership-distributed, less top-down, with more levels of empowerment […]

  • ‘We have a communication problem’ is not always a good start.

    ‘Lack of communication’ or  ‘a communication problem’, is perhaps number one declared culprit in most of our troubled organizational life. […]

  • In the War for Attention within your company, you may need a communication ceasefire

    Our faith in communication is enormous. Why? Perhaps because we know well the problems associated with the lack of communication. […]

  • ‘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 […]

  • ‘All Big Data comes from the same place, the past’

    The formidable Rory Sutherland, vice chairman of Ogilvy (who declares that has ‘an attractively vague job title which has allowed […]

  • Culture is the small print.

    Standard Operating Procedures, strategy documents, all normal process and systems and the organization chart are the headlines. If you really […]

  • Walking e-bays bearing second hand thoughts

    We are pulled to conform to the group, to participate, to contribute, to say something. Nodding is not enough. Taking […]

  • ‘Victorious warriors win first and then go to war’ (coaching session circa 500 BC)

    The full quote: ‘Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to […]

  • The person saying ‘we need to make sure that’ is probably the less likely person who will do anything ‘to make sure that’

    Wisdom Nomads go form meeting to meeting. ‘We need to make sure that’, ‘we have to know how this fits […]

  • Culture is in the A list, the one where ‘work’ sits. Not in the B list (‘when I have time, after A’)

    Culture is not a project, something to do on top of normal work, an extra, something to get your hands […]

  • The curious (anthropology) case of once a year Employee Satisfaction Survey Tsunamis. (Don’t be put off, I could not find a better title)

    The cult of Employee Satisfaction surveys is fading.  Companies are doing less or less frequent. Perhaps there is some tiredness. […]

  • How many people on your payroll have never licked a stamp?

    Beloit College, in Wisconsin, creates every year a ‘Mindset List’ It shows a list of facts about a particular new […]

  • In my shopping list for new leaders, circa 2018 (3 of 5): Bridge builders

    The word Pontifex (Pontiff in English) is the term associated with the Pope (twitter account…err.. @pontifex, what else?). I love […]

  • Organisational culture shaping. Counterinsurgency field manual (4 of 5): Structural changes hardly solve behavioural problems. It’s a trap.

    Structural answers to organizational problems are very unlikely to succeed. Division A people don’t collaborate with Division B people, so […]

  • Organisational culture shaping. Counterinsurgency field manual (2 of 5): Learn from mistakes (only if your manager does too).

    Learning from mistakes, make mistakes, learn, it’s OK, mistakes are OK, we are human, if we did not make mistakes […]

  • Organizational culture, Counterinsurgency Field Manual (1 of 5): What to do with toxic people.

    Toxic people. A sample. The top 12 to watch: The bully who is not challenged The bully who is not […]

  • Childhood ‘monsters under the bed’ never go away. They seem to reappear in corporations. Without the beds.

    If I had a say in new roles for large organizations, I think I would establish this new Division: VP […]

  • Organizations wired wrong (2 of 5): Why if you want ‘transparency’ you should not ask for it.

    An 18 year old paper in social anthropology by Marilyn Strathern (then at Cambridge) had the intriguing title of ‘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 […]