List

Corporate pathologies

  • The leader who said ‘make your numbers’ instead of ‘have a good trip back’

    A friend of mind remembers one of his bosses very well. ‘Make the numbers’, was apparently his way to say […]

  • The Process and The Outcome: married, just friends, or it’s complicated?

    So you have The Process and The Outcome dating. You would have thought that they are having a good time. […]

  • The UK Labour Party, Malaysian Airlines and ‘I am Really Stuck Inc’, they all need Reboot! not ‘Navel-Gazing-Improvement’

    When we developed Reboot! a while ago as an intense Accelerator (strategy and change accelerator), a simple premise was in […]

  • The organization’s collective self-belief is often hidden. Leaders need to hear the unsaid.

    Some organisations, or groups inside the organisation, suffer from lack of self belief. You could say weak self esteem. The […]

  • The Zappos inmates running the asylum, take two.Warning: this post contains flashes of cut-and-paste organizational models.

    I wrote about Zappos and Holacracy here, and got lots of questions. This is take two. In my work on […]

  • The indecision is final. Keep calm and wait for the next.

    A previous Daily Thought about decisions mentioned 3 reasons why decision making may be a problem in the organization (1) […]

  • Walking Emergencies in the payroll

    Years ago, when in corporate life and corporate payroll (yes, I was, before funding The Chalfont Project), we, non -Americans, […]

  • The Twentypercenters

    It is said that in any organization, 20% of the people do 80% of the work. I often think that […]

  • The halo effect of a budget cut: thinking postponed

    A budget cut is a budget cut. Everybody recognises one when in front of one. Organizations don’t impose them just […]

  • 2 real cases of Business Surrealism

    We offered a client unlimited support for a project, for a fixed cost. The clienr understood. Corporate Procurement didn’t. It […]

  • The corrosion of logic: from ‘why-what-how’, to ‘how, what, maybe why’.

    There was a time when the logic of things started with a why, followed with a what and ended in […]

  • The problem is that all we say is that ‘the problem is’. There is no ‘and’.

    We need to improve communication is not the same as this is what we need to do to improve communication, […]

  • Too-too land is a prison and too-too managers are its guards. This is what life there looks like.

    The company is too big to change. We are too small to compete. It’s too early for a Leadership Development. […]

  • 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 “Sokal Syndrome”: Intellectual nudity, Intellectual Impostures, Mind Grafitters and Airport Books Business School Graduates

    The 1966 Spring/Summer (special) issue of Social Text, an academic, “fashionable American cultural studies journal”, featured an article entitled “Transgressing […]

  • Busy-ness is either a symptom, a warning, or a serious disease. Never a healthy state.

    Busyness could be a cancer. It has nothing to do with business even if it’s just one letter different. Busyness […]

  • The company as a machine: a 90’s ideology still alive today.

    This is number 2 in the list of Idea-Logic systems (ideologies) I have started to share yesterday (The Idea-Logic (ideology) […]

  • Managing by ‘the short term numbers’: what I learnt many years ago from a screen on the wall

    A McKinsey article on Finance (2015) quotes: As a result of their focus on short-term EPS, major companies often pass […]

  • 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 […]

  • But what do they think? What do they want us to do? Why don’t they just tell us?

    In my consulting work, it is incredibly frequent to see people stuck with a question: ‘but what to they want […]

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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 […]