List

It’s Personal!

  • Gone fishing. Well, not quite. In the meantime…

    Daily Thoughts will be back soon after a break. In the meantime, here are two recent ones on Leadership that […]

  • A few Daily Thoughts you may want to catch up with

      Daily Thoughts have a short summer break. In the meantime I thought you’d welcome to read some of the […]

  • Dr Kate Grange, R.I.P. Hello, my name is Leandro Herrero

    Dr Kate Grange has died. Terminally ill from cancer for a long time, she has finally left us. She campaigned […]

  • Uncertainty, vulnerability and control are the three sisters dominating our lives.

    There are hundreds of pieces of evidence including serious research that show that human beings (and animals for that matter) […]

  • My 20 Rules of Leadership

    My 20 RULES OF LEADERSHIP Earn credibility all the time. Stocks deplete easily. Act as if you did not have […]

  • The 19th Century Great Man Theory of history is still well alive in our understanding of leadership in organizations.

    My Daily Thought yesterday about the Blair’s Fundamental, Leadership Error has triggered a lot of comments in social media. Most […]

  • Compelling narrative and truth are, of course, two different things. Leadership must make them inseparable

      For months now a picture of a pack of wolfs walking in the snow has been circulated in many […]

  • The ‘Blair’s Fundamental Error’ of leadership (it’s not political)

    In the day in which the Cilcot Inquiry on the war in Iraq has been finally presented in the UK, […]

  • Imperfect data, imperfect instructions, low predictability, high trust: just a model for business (from boat racing)

    My very good client BTG plc has created a habit of getting leadership teams together into racing boats for a […]

  • The room was filled with smoke, no windows, I had to leave. The day I deleted my LinkedIn post for the first time

    As I had spent the week, and to my own surprise, highly impacted by the Brexit results, I wrote a […]

  • The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Killers (in the organization)

    1. Postpone. Some great killers postpone everything. They don’t even have to use the language, they simply organise things in […]

  • What is the point? Probably the best answer is when ‘there isn’t any’.

    For sixteen days in June, people could walk over floating peers on Lake Iseo (Italy) , all covered with yellow […]

  • 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 […]

  • ‘One problem, one visit’. My primary care physician’s screen in the waiting room says. I am revolted.

    My General Practitioner’s (public health, UK) waiting room has a new big screen that announces ‘Your visit with the doctor […]

  • Dont let Tuesdays be shaped by Mondays

    Many people have asked me repeatedly which ones of my Daily Thoughts are my best or favourites. Hard to say. […]

  • Within us, between us and around us. The only 3 chapters of Psychology and the only 3 modules of leadership development.

    Trying to make Psychology easy! There are 3 spaces, and only 3 that matter: Within us: how can we get […]

  • ‘Human’ and ‘leadership’ can go together by inviting our demons for dinner.

    If leadership is a praxis, something that ‘I’ do (name and surname here, please), then, knowing a little bit about […]

  • Unchallenged little nastiness is killing entire cultures.

    Those people in the corridor and the cafeteria are very good, and successful, at saying, very vocally: ‘we will never […]

  • The infuriating Pope Francis style of leadership: he actually does things. What’s wrong with this guy?

    Pope Francis, spiritual head of 1.3 billion people went to Lesbos, saw the immigrants, stayed with them for 4 hours […]

  • How we cope with new environments. The ‘old’ and the ‘young’ extremes of our humanity

    Old people who move suddenly to a nursing home/care-assisted home without having been accustomed, can suffer devastating health consequences. In […]

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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 […]