List

General

  • Here is the good news: good values, translated into behaviours, are contagious

    How do you make values live? Install them in a culture? Model 1: You preach them and preach them, and […]

  • Some restructuring does not seem part of the solution. Bigger problems continue to appear. And now the Fire Brigade has a permanent seat in the Boardroom.

    Stanislav Andreski ( 1919-2007) in his little big book Social Science as Sorcery, writing about the influence of the social […]

  • If leadership in organizations followed some ‘activism rules’; not standard management logic. Here is one rule.

    Join my live webinar THIS WEEK. Book your seat! I’ll be discussing leadership as a praxis…’no one is ever a leader, […]

  • Employee loyalty is a plural. Leadership is the host of that plurality, always an irrational mix

    6 days to go until my live webinar. Book your seat! I’ll be discussing leadership as a praxis…’no one is […]

  • The organization’s collective self-belief is often hidden. Leaders need to hear the unsaid.

    Taken from my forthcoming book: Camino – Leadership Notes On The Road. Read Extract Chapter 1 Part 2.    Some organizations or […]

  • Leadership in organizations is about mobilizing people. The leader is a ‘Social Arsonist’

    ‘A good organizer is a social arsonist who goes around setting people on fire.’—Fred Ross Fred Ross (1910-1992) American community […]

  • If in doubt, make it personal

    Taken from my soon to be released book, Camino – Leadership Notes On The Road    Invited to present at TEDx […]

  • Happy Christmas and New Year to the Daily Thoughts Community

    Happy Christmas and New Year to everybody in the Daily Thoughts community. We have all had the most challenging year […]

  • The alternative post-mortem of failed change programmes. (1 of 5): There were too many people involved and too much debate. Not the opposite.

    This five part mini-series (!) is not glamorous. It tries to uncover some inconvenient truths via a reverse engineering of […]

  • Organizations don’t learn. People do. Sometimes too much. So where does company memory come in?

    The modern organization is fluid. People are not necessarily assigned to one place, one team, even one single role. The […]

  • Trespassers will be recruited: a four-word strategy in the Battle of Ideas

    Societal issues, clash of ideologies, fundamentalism, political engagement (or lack of it), organizational innovation, Leadership 2020, no matter what direction […]

  • God’s answer to somebody who complained to him that they did not win the lottery: “Buy that damned ticket!” (Passionate people, take notice)

    As Woody Allen said, showing up is 80% of  life. The bookshelves, digital or otherwise, are full of ‘How-To-Succeed-In’ stuff. […]

  • You want to seek the company of a few rejected people

    There are many compilations but I found these examples in distractify.com. These are cases of rejection that should make us […]

  • History is constructed. The leader’s legacy is not retrospective. We build it daily, so we’d better test it.

    I previously wrote about company cultures having a glue, The One Global Culture does not exist. But pretending that it […]

  • Collaborating across borders needs one thing: borders

    There is a romantic view of the organization that sees it completely borderless, inside and outside. Inside, this view says, […]

  • Employee Engagement Surveys: Be careful what you ask for, you might get it.

    There are two opposite and wrong reactions to Employee (engagement/satisfaction) surveys. At one end, there is the ‘ignore the findings’. […]

  • 10 reasons why you should retire ‘Passion’ from your value system

    Passion is an emotion, or set of emotions. You may want, indeed, that your people are passionate, but you can’t […]

  • Oh, mental frames! How easy to create misery!

    ‘Let’s be real and aware of the current budget realities’ is a warning that leaders should give to their people […]

  • ‘The tyranny of the moment’. Liberating Leaders Wanted.

    Thomas Hylland Eriksen is a Norwegian Anthropology professor that has achieved more than any of his fellow anthropologists: you only […]

  • 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 […]

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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 […]