List
  • 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 […]

  • 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 […]

  • My well intentioned food fed my well intentioned thoughts. How weird.

    In my job as an organization architect, I travel quite a lot and therefore I stay in lots of hotels […]

  • The corporate mille-feuille. Layers of initiatives don’t touch each other

    In a large company, what do a leadership development, a culture change and a business integration programme typically have in […]

  • Prolonged agony in reorganizations, is simply bad management

    Reorganisations often follow these phases: smell, gossip, announcement and implementation. The period between announcement and implementation is when most emotions […]

  • 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 […]

  • Orphan grenades: the worse form of friendly fire in the organization. Some examples.

    We have a problem in Division A. Leaders are not doing their job. Leaders are not living the values. Some […]

  • ‘Perfection of planning is a symptom of decay’. Winning by making less errors, and other digressions.

    The art of dealing with incomplete and imperfect data: I want to put this into the water supply of some […]

  • 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 […]

  • The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Killers (in the organization)

    1. Postpone. Some great killers postpone everything. They don’t even have to use the language, they simply organise things in […]

  • ‘Sustainable but not too much’ is the best state of the healthy organization

    Sustainability of change, of cultural initiatives, of well intentioned corporate improvements is the key challenge. We are all quite energetic […]

  • ‘One problem, one visit’. My primary care physician’s screen in the waiting room says. I am revolted.

    My General Practitioner’s (public health, UK) waiting room has a new big screen that announces ‘Your visit with the doctor […]

  • The pilgrimage to the top of the Leadership Mountain to ask for permission, blessings and a bit of gratification.

    Scenario 1: The Leadership Team/top Management Team is in high control mode. They feel they need to make many kinds […]

  • It’s cool to think. It’s not cool to do crap things.

    I am borrowing this line from Obama’s speech at Rutgers. Of course he was referring to certain presidential candidate. “Facts, […]

  • Thanks for your email. A proper robot would have done better.

    Dear Mr Herrero. I have been trying to contact you but you were busy. No, you haven’t, we have no […]

  • If we wear earplugs, the annoying noise of the organization would disappear and, life would be much better.

    A friend of mine told me a story about his laptop. It got warmer and warmer; the fan on all […]

  • Inefficiencies, frustrations and unhappiness? Is the right path to growth, congratulations.

    A good article came to me via my colleague Caroline, always ready to save some gems from my spam filter […]

  • The logic of speed yoga, and organizational clocks

    Have you heard of speed yoga? Me neither. Although Mr Google points to some YouTube videos that in fact are […]

  • The new employees who never left their previous one

    Have you noticed how many employees seem to be in ‘one employer behind time zone’? They never left the previous […]

  • Rule #3: Systematic use of sweeping generalizations is reason for dismissal

    OK, a bit harsh, but this is what I mean. Some people are very good at this. ‘We have a […]

  • To search my website, please use the form below.

      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 […]