List

Creativity and Innovation

  • The fastest and best way to build a creative culture: all revealed now

    The fastest and best way to build a creative culture is to have lots of creative people together. No kidding. […]

  • Focus, focus! But only after un-focusing a lot

    Our managerial training and praxis has been quite successful at making us guilty of not focusing enough on a task […]

  • Plan for the intended, watch the unintended, embrace the extended

    (1) We plan operations, change, leadership, anything, with intended consequences in mind. These are often translated into KPIs, milestones, and […]

  • May Change Management have a great funeral

    I good friend, expert in Communications, has created her new website with a prominent quote of mine, ‘Change Management as […]

  • The painting is a beautiful, delicate masterpiece. The artist’s workshop is a mess.

    The process of creativity can be very messy. In fact, it is perhaps necessarily messy. Like the artist’s workshop. The […]

  • Organisational culture shaping. Counterinsurgency field manual (and 5 of 5): Be a bit inefficient if you want to be effective. Or you can be boring

    The problem with super efficacy and super efficiency is that what works for a Swiss watch does not work for […]

  • The conspiracy of the books in my library.

    This is a straight quote from Nassim Taleb (Fooled by Randomness, Black Swan, Antifragile) A private library is not an […]

  • Reinventing management is reinventing the skill set. It’s urgent, and the answers are elsewhere, not in traditional management practices.

    Reinventing management to deal with the complexities of the world and, therefore, the complexities of business challenges is something that, […]

  • Bold leadership pays off. It can also be killed by those who are highly paid to be professionally afraid

    Years ago, I persuaded a pharmaceutical client to make three bold moves in one: (1)   To create a New Product […]

  • Give them an A. Then ask them to justify it.

    Wonderful orchestra conductor, music educator and leadership speaker, Ben Zander, used to explain how he gives his music students an […]

  • Irrelevance, survival, average, good, or ahead of the game? Buying tickets for the latter.

    I’ve been in front of 2000 people in Ecuador last week. Out of 8000, all belonging to a family owned […]

  • Listen, people. I’ve got good news! The company is now fully prepared for the past

    This is my rephrasing of ‘The army is now fully prepared for the previous war’, inspired by John Gall, in […]

  • Creating a Gender and Race, Diversity and Inclusion programme? A culture of Diversity-Full-Stop will be your most powerful engine.

    People creating ‘diversity and inclusion’ programmes often  have a hard time. The programme for the concert is brilliant, the music […]

  • Imperfect data, imperfect instructions, low predictability, high trust: just a model for business (from boat racing)

    My very good client BTG plc has created a habit of getting leadership teams together into racing boats for a […]

  • ‘Customer Obsession Disorder’ is gaining ground. Bad idea.

    Perhaps because custumer focus was not enough, we created customer centrism. Apparently this is not enough and we now need […]

  • Critical Thinking is up in the list of skills in the 2020 Davos shopping list. If anything, I have a problem with the date. The skill gap is now, well and alive

    A report on the Future of Jobs by the World Economic Forum compares the skills priorities of 2015 with the […]

  • Efficiency, Efficacy and Effectiveness: the triplets of Management (and the risk of dating the wrong sister)

    Many restructuring efforts, perhaps process re-engineering (whether these days you call them like this or not) and a great deal […]

  • Give me a good practice and I will create a good theory to explain it. Even a good philosophy and a disruptive worldview.

    Modern and not so modern ‘social movements’ with or a without business proposition are portrayed as a concerted and positioned […]

  • ‘New people bring in new ideas’. Keep it as a hypothesis

    How many times I’ve seen in my clients the high expectations about new people. Not just the new hires but […]

  • All thoughts come out of silence. Leadership development may turn out to be free after all.

    Perhaps one of the most difficult things a leader has to do is to be mindful of his/her own thinking. […]

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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 […]