List
Critical Thinking
A culture of ownership when you don’t own the company (or even when you do)
It has always been a Great Hypothesis. It goes like this: ‘if employees acted as owners, as if they owned […]
Entering as a question mark, leaving as a period
We all were born as questions. The old saying that ‘children enter school as question marks and leave as full […]
Measurement: the Dogma. Here are 10 critical thinking principles.
The following are not the same: What you want to measure What you need to measure What you have been […]
The cost of doing something versus the cost of not doing it. The second half is often missing.
Confronted with options and strategies, the cost of doing things is very often the first thing that comes to our […]
‘Let’s see what that data says’. The Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy lives on.
Probably we will never be short of data anymore. We even have now Big Data, with big capitals, as a […]
The ‘initiative’ often lets personal commitment off the hook
‘For every problem, the Victorians have a building’. For every idea that we need to carry forward, we invent an […]
5 things very successful leaders have in common
1. They don’t read blogs entitled ‘5 things very successful leaders have in common’. 2. They don’t care about lists […]
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 hard sell of a big theme supported by dubious, incoherent but dramatically presented evidence
he British journalist, Bryan Appleyard called Gladwellism: the hard sell of a big theme supported by dubious, incoherent but dramatically […]
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 […]
Always explain the trade off. There is always one, and people can always understand it
Many problems with decision making inside the company can be attributed to three causes: 1. Bad process 2. Good processes […]
Mathematize: the 9 things you need to know about things that start with numbers
Mathematizable thinking is like soldiers building a frontier with razor wired walls. There is an enclosed world and a world […]
The brutal power of the analogy as a shortcut to the road of Unthinking
Paul Krugman, professor, journalist and Nobel Prize, in his column in the New York Times has mentioned an economic analogy […]
No list of ‘The best treats of X’ or ‘The 10 habits of Y’ surprises me anymore.
1. These 9 features (below) define a good manager in Google. 2. You have Google as a model company ( […]
Trophy employees, their sugar company and its useful idiots
In any organization they are positive deviants (deviants from expected norms, who achieve results ) and other ‘statistical abnormalities’, by […]
‘We are both saying the same with different words’. No, we are not.
Groupthink arrives when the group agrees with itself on everything, dismisses the external ones who disagree, ignores warnings, ignores facts, […]
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 […]
Single track thinking, the road to a sure end (if your don’t care whether it’s the right end or the wrong end)
‘Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end; then stop’. That was Lewis Carroll advice […]
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 […]
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