List

Corporate pathologies

  • And they all gave one day of their holidays

    A true story. A health care worker is truly struggling to do her work and caring for a son who […]

  • Management technique: the transplant

    The answer to individual negativity is group positiveness.  Fighting individual negativity at individual level is a risky fight. If you […]

  • Empowerment: the muddle. The wrong conversation, until you start unpacking the concept and dismantling the house of buzzwords

    The ‘expectations muddle’ of empowerment has different shapes and flavours: I expect you to do something but you don’t think […]

  • The cult of issues. The culture in which airtime is dominated by problems and where navel-gazing is king

    Some cultures a very introspective. In a healthy way. Some are pathologically introspective and spend a lot of time dissecting […]

  • A tsunami of navel-gazing, force 11, is impacting business, society and politics. And individual identity.

    I don’t like to sound gloomy, but, is the current self-centrism an epidemic of colossal proportions? Or, another way to […]

  • 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 […]

  • Thesaurus – based value and behaviours systems are meaningless, exhausted and cheap

    Let’s start somewhere else. What is the logic behind Listmania? Very often there isn’t one. But starting a note/blog/communication with […]

  • 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 […]

  • Listening is more than being silent. Learn to spot the listener and call out the ones who pretend.

    There is a difference between listening and just waiting to speak. You can spot people doing either. Some people don’t […]

  • To Scale or not to scale? This is the Shakespearean culture question.

    Behavioural/cultural shaping in organizations does not scale up by the leaders simply having the right mindset and motivation. A mechanism […]

  • Leave your sandals at the door

    This is the request we make at the beginning of a Viral Change™ programme. Forget your function and your hierarchical […]

  • Defeatism and cynicism are two toxic sisters that need to be challenged. Every minute of silence is a terrible complicity in the erosion of hope.

    A slow growth cancer in organizations. People unnecessarily and gratuitously condemning the company to an impossible future: we will never […]

  • Stop press: The C-suite people and top leadership, major problem revealed

    For CEOs, CFOs, CHROs, and other Cs, and Divisional Ds’, survey after survey try to identify their focus, their concerns, […]

  • Corporate language needs a transfusion of humanity. It can be done.

    Corporate speak is of course tribal. So, to belong, you have to speak the tribal idiom. Through my work, I […]

  • An enlightened top leadership is sometimes a fantastic alibi for a non-enlightened management to do whatever they want

    Nothing is more rewarding than having a CEO who says world-changing things in the news and who produces bold, enlightened […]

  • Tribes in the organization: seeing the world in segments, one character at a time . The Big 40 (2 of 3)

    Exercise: take a piece of paper and put names next to each category. Use your organization or an organization you […]

  • This best kept, secret jumpstart, will save you months of pain in people, team reorg and alignment

    The following line will short cut months of (building) ‘alignment’, integration, reorganization, team building, coalition building, start-up get-to-know, redeployment of […]

  • 4 types of generosity in the workplace. 2 with epidemic potential.

    Four types: The generosity of the traffic light. Every fixed interval, it lets you get through. It even changes colour […]

  • Trust in 3 models. Trust me, it’s simple.

    There are three major sources of trust generation. Everything else is commentary: The ‘keep promises’. I can rely on you, […]

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      Daily Thoughts

    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 […]
    September 30th, 2022

    Change that doesn’t deliver change-ability is a waste

    The traditional model of change is the one I call ‘destination’ type, that is, how to go from A to […]
    September 23rd, 2022

    Company structures: aggregate and disaggregate

    New organizations, and old ones in the business of transforming themselves, would be better off learning by heart these two […]
    September 15th, 2022

    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 […]
    September 2nd, 2022

    The best organizational model is to have more than one under the same roof

    Command and control management has fewer friends, and it’s quite terminally ill as well. The heirs are fighting for a piece […]
    August 26th, 2022

    Unprecedented Times? Sure. Let’s Move On Please.

    Somewhere in the post-Covid peak, I promised myself that I wasn’t going to pay attention anymore to anything that starts with […]
    August 19th, 2022

    Engagement, Empowerment and Ownership Culture Meet at One Single Point. Obvious, Simple and Incredibly Forgotten

    Employee engagement efforts, ownership values and empowerment behaviours must meet at one point. It’s simple, not terribly controversial, based upon […]
    August 12th, 2022

    Employee Engagement and the Productivity Magnet

    For me, the most damaging use of the employee engagement framework is the widespread one that states that ‘engagement’ predicts […]