List

Culture

  • Four types of Employee Engagement, with the compliments of the German Army

    I was told sometime, somewhere, by somebody (you can see the strength of my recollection), and then found this again […]

  • There must be a better way (I have good news)

    There must be a better way than having 200 consultants landing in my company and doing the stuff for me, […]

  • My Russian Dolls theory of the organization

    No system can be fully understood within the system. No, this is not an esoteric statement but a simple, common […]

  • Do you have a ‘Chaos Monkey’ in your management system? You should.

    Many organizations have a Risk Management function of some sort. Often scattered amongst different constituencies: manufacturing, engineering, R&D etc. It […]

  • It’s possible to change gears, create a Game Plan or align a full team without agonising.

    One of the reasons why I have created a suite of Accelerators is because I believe that sometimes we complicate […]

  • We always have some sort of ‘strategy’. The question is which level, and, does it do what we intend?

    I am still on holiday for a few more days I  was asked awhile ago to re-post this little frame […]

  • ‘Never try to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and it annoys the pig’

    Robert Anson Heinlein (1907-1988), American science fiction writer, was famous for his quotes. This is one.  Many uses and interpretations […]

  • Can anybody dispel the mystery for me, please? Who are ‘they’?

    These are commonly found uses of the expression ‘they’ within organizations. They wont approve this They don’t get it They […]

  • Using national cultural differences to explain everything, is a smokescreen for managerial incompetence.

    When I see that the first port of use of managerial justification, particularly difficulties, is ‘cultural differences’, I smell a […]

  • However…

    Many years ago, I got into Decision Analysis at the hands of my good friend Larry Philips of the London […]

  • Independence is dead. Write your declaration of Inter-dependence

    There was a time when writing a Declaration of Independence was the climax of an identity quest. This is a […]

  • It’s official: the single, magic bullet, that characterises good leadership is to back off.

    It should not surprise us that people are constantly looking for the magic bullet of leadership. What makes a good […]

  • Bottom-lining everything is simply silly. Tell the bottom-liners to calm down and speak properly.

    The following line is taken from one of multiple leadership coaching service offerings that you can find in the web. […]

  • Corporate Botox

    My local DYI/Bricolage/Hardware story has a terrible service. But now, in the tradition started by Wall Mart (tradition now extinct) […]

  • Rebels: they need a cause

    There are always rebels and mavericks in organizations, nonconformists, contrarian and deviants. They may be tolerated, ignored, embraced or disregarded. […]

  • Solutionism as a culture: proficiency in problem solving

    I have become apprehensive about the use of the term ‘solutions driven’. I am a big culprit however. I have […]

  • We buy an elephant and then we train the elephant to behave like a gazelle.

    What would be wrong with buying gazelles in the first place? The answer I hear sometimes is, ‘Well, the market […]

  • Don’t start with an alignment obsession. Dissent is good, creative tension even better.

    Let me share these scenarios. There are caricatures of common situations. R&D wants to create a product that works. Marketing […]

  • Collective Leadership: Two Acid Tests.

    I call Collective Leadership that state in the evolution of management teams or leadership teams when the power of the […]

  • Full of Embassies: The company is not an Internal Diplomatic Service

    People in organizations spend a lot of time representing somebody else or something else. It feels sometimes that the company […]

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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 […]