List

General

  • ‘Sceptical people and enemies of change need to be sidelined’. Really?

    We all have our share of ‘difficult people’. Conventional management of change has taught us that there is always going […]

  • There is nothing I can do’ must be fought before it becomes collective belief.

    Feeling trapped, is at the core of some aspects of one’s mental health, and also organizational distress. The deep awareness […]

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

    What should employees be loyal to? Ask an average leader: to the company, of course. Loyalty may be disguised. It […]

  • Habits have no meaning, they create it. Start with behaviours, get meaning

    In my organizational consulting work, and in behavioural terms, I am very used to be told, and challenged, that there […]

  • Large scale mobilization of people needs a small scale set of orchestrators. It works in society and it works in organizations

    I wish I could remember where I did read these stats.  Russia under the Tsar 1914-1917…had 180 million peasants and […]

  • Make your trade off(s) transparent

    In my experience, people can understand budget cuts, but there are several types of acceptance, leading to several levels of […]

  • I can prove anything in management thinking. Watch me!

    I can’t remember where I saw this. This is part of the point. It could have been anywhere. But I […]

  • If you want to increase employee engagement and employee satisfaction, increase your company performance (yes, the order is not a typo)

    There is evidence, intelligently articulated by Phil Rosenzweig in 2007 (The Halo Effect), that a series of measures of employee […]

  • Iconic leadership: the illusion of copying a one off

    Whilst the holidays roll on, here is a leadership theme to consider Picture this organization.  Closed culture, culture of secrecy, […]

  • In the War for Attention within your company, you may need a communication ceasefire

    Our faith in communication is enormous. Why? Perhaps because we know well the problems associated with the lack of communication. […]

  • Innovation? Great, but I am not in charge of it!

    Years ago I was talking to a client, a Senior VP in the company, about a project that had to […]

  • We need the aliens. Everybody needs aliens. Smart aliens who can ask questions and open Pandora boxes for us.

    The best swordsman in the world doesn’t need to fear the second best swordsman in the world; no, the person […]

  • Happiness in the organization is an outcome not an input. Prescribing happiness is a behavioural nonsense.

    Another important idea (first published in 2016) worth revisiting. Enjoy! You can’t inject happiness in the organization. You can’t put […]

  • “A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world.”

    A previously posted Daily Thought – well-worth revisiting. John Le Carre, British ex secret intelligence serviceman, espionage writer, dixit. He […]

  • Question: what is the cost of not doing X?

    First published in August 2018. We are used to look at the cost of doing things. And rightly so. We […]

  • Confronted with dysfunctionality, a reorganization solution must be the last resort, not the first.

    First posted back in January. Most of our organizational problems are behavioural. Structural answers hardly solve behavioural problems. Amalgamating A […]

  • More on Employee Engagement (4/7): ‘The Cause’. Engagement with the company or within the company?

    This is model 3 (but the 4th post, confusing!)  ‘The Cause’. Employees join forces to work on a Cause: green agenda, corporate […]

  • There is really only one measure of the attractiveness of the organization you lead

    First published October 2018 If you love KPIs, here is one. The attractiveness of your (corporate) function is defined by […]

  • The Zeus strategy: de-aggregating the problem

    First published back in 2016 Plato told us in his Symposium that humans were originally androgynous, not men or women. […]

  • Leave your sandals at the door

    First published in November 2017. This is the request we make at the beginning of a Viral Change™ programme. Forget […]

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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 […]