List

Culture

  • How to create collaboration? Parachute people in who collaborate a lot

    Collaboration is behavioural, not a process or system. As a behaviour, it can’t be taught. It’s something that some people […]

  • I’d love to run this experiment in a hospital.

    Reported in many places: The noise levels of some Intensive Care Units (ICU) in hospitals are similar to those of […]

  • People who perform and live in Formal Org Land, and people who have make/break power: two different lists

    These 8, self-explanatory categories of people are the natural focus of traditional HR and management systems . They are needed […]

  • The Benign Dictatorship of the Feed Back Form

    You’ve just been to a concert in the Great Hall of your city. Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 “Resurrection”. Berlin […]

  • Most good clues about the culture of the organization can be found in the invisible, the unsaid. This is where serious culture work needs to start.

    Public sector health in many parts of the world has been financially squeezed. Committed health workers have continued to deliver […]

  • Bring the aliens. The others are too familiar with the solution

    ‘Familiarity breeds contempt’, the proverb says. But in management, it also breeds lost of content and satisfied people. We are […]

  • Small steps, small wins against an accelerated reality. Sensible strategy or a suicidal note?

    ‘I am convinced that a well thought out “small wins approach” is the premier path to effective strategy implementation, and […]

  • You can only change ‘the culture’ if you have ‘one’. Otherwise, the problem and the answer are both plural.

    The main reason why many cultural change and transformation programmes in large organizations fail is because you can’t change ‘the […]

  • Culture is in the A list, the one where ‘work’ sits. Not in the B list (‘when I have time, after A’)

    Culture is not a project, something to do on top of normal work, an extra, something to get your hands […]

  • I want builders, not problem solvers, not flow-chart artists.

    I also don’t want bystanders, people who give diagnosis but would not have a clue about treatment, people who dwell […]

  • HBR says culture is not the culprit, and, by the way, you can’t fix it. Yes we can.

    Harvard Business Review (HBR) never ceases to amaze me. Very often I feel that there is some sort of a […]

  • Fixed ideas. From a guest blogger who knows.

    ‘In the long run my observations have convinced me that some men, reasoning preposterously, first establish some conclusion in their […]

  • The problem with too many decisions pushed up to the top of the organization, usually lies with those at the top who complain most

    When too many decisions are pushed upwards in the organization, and the top layers of leadership complain about it, often […]

  • Customer centric? How about starting with manners. Revolution, really.

    Manners is an old fashion concept. Courtesy, consideration, empathy with the other? All in one? Manners are the behavioural expression […]

  • Protest platforms are hardly learning ones. Engagement surveys and events feed back are often anything but learning tools.

    Political commentators in the US have argued that Donald Trump’s campaign is a protest one, attracting people who are against […]

  • Exotics in the payroll. Anthropology excursions into corporate life.

    ‘Daily Thoughts’ is in pause mode for a few days and will resume with new content on Monday 4th of […]

  • Why and how some initiatives scale and others get lost in oblivion

    ‘Daily Thoughts’ is in pause mode for a few days and will resume with new content on Monday 4th of […]

  • Innovation: still the Holy Grail of management.

    ‘Daily Thoughts’ is in pause mode for a few days.. You may have missed some of these. Here is a […]

  • ‘We, as a team’, may actually not need a team.

    As some of us punctuate this time of the year (Happy Easter!) it is also a time for the Daily […]

  • Don’t go to Abilene. Nobody wants to.

    Jerry B Harvey’s 1974 article “The Abilene Paradox: The Management of Agreement’, contains this vignette. On a hot afternoon visiting […]

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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 […]