List

Innovation

  • Zappos without the zapatos: not all inmates want to take over the asylum.

    Zappos, (from zapatos, Spanish for shoe) has gone self-management. If you have not heard about Zappos, it does not mean […]

  • ‘Invert, always invert’: a fundamental, zero-cost, unstuck management technique

    Carl Gustav Jacob Jacobi, a 19th century Swiss mathematician is remembered by many things in his scientific turf, but by […]

  • Alibi to keep the status quo: ‘We are a regulated industry’

    Amongst my clients I have a good representation of ‘regulated industries’ such as pharmaceuticals and financial services. I, myself, spent […]

  • Nine basic contradictions in organizational life. Ignore at your peril.

    Mastering healthy tension between them, or surrounding to an ‘impossible alignment’ is a choice for leaders and managers. The worse […]

  • Science advances by a series of funerals. And some management practices are not feeling very well.

    ‘Science advances by a series of funerals’. This is how John Brockman, founder of The Edge, and editor of a […]

  • Benchmarking as a health hazard. Cause of managers severe neck pain confirmed

    Benchmarking is a rear-mirror strategy. It’s about catching up with something that has already happened. People who spend too much […]

  • 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 slack advantage: ‘The minute the future becomes unpredictable, efficiency can become your enemy’.

    I wrote before in these Daily Thoughts that a bit of inefficiency is very efficient An interview with Adam Pisoni, […]

  • 20 years of experience, or 1 year of experience repeated 20 times?

    It was a cruel joke form the times of Re-engineering. ‘Here it goes Joe’, started the joke. Then the quote: […]

  • ‘If you have two guys who think the same, fire one of them’

    As many provocative quotes go, the caricature of the extreme makes the point. We in organizations often suffer from the […]

  • Seeking unpredictable answers.

    We spend too much time seeking predictable answers. They are not necessarily bad. If I work with Peter and Paul […]

  • Organizing, mobilizing, engaging: Harvard Business School or 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue? My choice is clear

    The recent State of the Union address by US president Obama had, to distant and detached eyes such as mine, […]

  • Create fast innovation spaces: kindle ideas in your own Lab126

    We are social animals. We live in spaces, with rules, with rituals, in tribal environments. We are both architects of […]

  • Leadership’s hearing problems

    ‘And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music’. Friedrich […]

  • The healing smell of a corporate bonfire. (The Hernan Cortes Exit strategy).

    The British retailer Marks and Spencer (M&S) has ‘Plan A’ as the title for their vast corporate and social responsibility […]

  • My local bakery inspired me

    I used to live in a small village in England where we just had one, also small, very popular bakery. […]

  • ‘Hill-climbing’ as a model for disruptive thinking – Guest blog by Scott E. Fahlman

    There’s something to keep in mind when trying to create a disruptive change:  Most such attempts fail, and when one […]

  • To stop doing some things is a great source of added value. Try it!

    One of the very frequent questions that I ask my clients is what they can stop doing so that they […]

  • Full-blown Disruptive Innovation is not the Holy Grail for any business. But injections of Disruptive and Critical Thinking could be life saving.

    It is unrealistic to expect upside down disruptive innovation in any business. But the absence of disruptive thinking may be […]

  • 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 […]

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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 […]