List

Governance

  • The New Classics of Management. (1 of 2)

    Amongst the challenges that management in the 21st Century has, which are shared, of course, by specific functions such as […]

  • The pilgrimage to the top of the Leadership Mountain to ask for permission, blessings and a bit of gratification.

    Scenario 1: The Leadership Team/top Management Team is in high control mode. They feel they need to make many kinds […]

  • Can we agree on these rules? Since life is short, I thought I would suggest some etiquette for our collaboration.

    Don’t leave around a floating opinion, ended by ‘in my opinion’, not leading anywhere in particular. That is just use […]

  • A new word for corporate life: de-corporatization

    In my world, ‘corporate’ is synonymous of big structure, big processes and big systems. Of course, it is not its […]

  • In empowerment terms, be careful what you are asking for, you might get it.

    The project team has been complaining for a long time of their lack of empowerment. They have a lot of […]

  • ‘Problem Three’ appears when we treat complexity with more complexity. Many organizations breed it. The UK NHS is caught in it.

    At some point of the organization’s growth, complexity kicks in. Before that threshold, you had two problems: managing growth and […]

  • The organization is not a Grand Bazaar. A transactional model of the firm is a trap. Leaders should get out of it.

    If you push me for a articulation of human relationships, everything is transactional. But in a more specific way, transactional […]

  • Efficiency, Efficacy and Effectiveness: the triplets of Management (and the risk of dating the wrong sister)

    Many restructuring efforts, perhaps process re-engineering (whether these days you call them like this or not) and a great deal […]

  • Empowerment is an output. Only if you can visualize it, you can craft it.

    Employee empowerment is an output, an outcome. If you start thinking of employee empowerment as an input, something you are […]

  • Leaders as architects: how to build the house, page one.

    The closest thing to designing and building an organization is the designing and building a house. You can build a […]

  • 10 ways to fool everybody as an organization expert. They guarantee some attention and all have been tried and tested, somewhere.

    These 10 positions provide organizational solutions with guarantee of some good reception. All of them are ‘possible’. If you want […]

  • My spell check changes ‘methodology’ to ‘mythology’ automatically. Are the gods telling me something?

    Method is a trick that has been used twice, people say. Having a method for anything is hardly a negative […]

  • Empowerment: the muddle. The wrong conversation, until you start unpacking the concept and dismantling the house of buzzwords.

    The ‘expectations muddle’ of empowerment has different shapes and flavours: I expect you to do something but you don’t think […]

  • The leadership team tipping point: the arrow points South.

    Some top management teams and leadership teams are created by the Internal Organization Chart Robot Officer, that is, they are […]

  • The Bad Apples Theory on colossal business fiascos. (It’s the basket, stupid!)

    Volkswagen has declared that the Diesel fiasco and the massive installation of software, built in to deceive outputs and pass […]

  • Time to retire the ‘HR Business Partner’ concept, if HR wants to ever make it to the high table.

    The Business Partner concept or model was developed particularly for HR by Ulrich and Brockbank in 2005 to stress the […]

  • 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 ( […]

  • The company as a machine: a 90’s ideology still alive today.

    This is number 2 in the list of Idea-Logic systems (ideologies) I have started to share yesterday (The Idea-Logic (ideology) […]

  • The Idea-Logic (ideology) of a company. (1) Business as war.

    Companies, as large or not so large social groupings, have an ideology ( a logic of ideas). It may not […]

  • Managing by ‘the short term numbers’: what I learnt many years ago from a screen on the wall

    A McKinsey article on Finance (2015) quotes: As a result of their focus on short-term EPS, major companies often pass […]

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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 […]