List

Leadership

  • A heroic culture is a sick culture. If the company can only be run on heroic mode, call the doctor. But heroes, individually, are welcome.

    We all know, and have, some heroes in our organizations. People who jump in, solve problems, make themselves available, walk […]

  • No single discipline has the answer anymore. There is no escape. Read and re-skill like mad.

    Whether you are sitting in HR, Organizational Development or any other corporate function, or simply in a position of management […]

  • ‘Never try to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and it annoys the pig’

    This quote is from Robert Anson Heinlein (1907-1988), American science fiction writer, who was famous for his quotes. This one […]

  • The leader is not an answerphone. Or a help desk.

    In our Viral Change™ Programmes, members of the community (company) of activists, invariably ask questions such as, what shall we […]

  • 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 different […]

  • Being compelled to react, does not make you a good leader. The clue, and the winning, is in the number of problems that you decide not to address.

    Every morning, when we wake up, put our work clothes on and head for whatever is in our Outlook or […]

  • The burning platform was the greatest management invention. Now, can we move on?

    Apparently nothing can change unless there is as ‘burning platform’. Business and old change management loves that kind of drama. […]

  • The most dangerous character in the organization’s plot: The Self-Proclaimed Saviour.

    The Self-Proclaimed Saviours will never save you since their only intent is their personal success. It happens in society and […]

  • Employee Engagement as morally imperative. (6/7) A forgotten model?

    Here is a ‘very novel’ concept. Employee Engagement is needed because… it’s good in and of itself. Because work enhances […]

  • The painting is a beautiful, delicate masterpiece. The artist’s workshop is a mess.

    The process of creativity can be very messy. In fact, it is perhaps necessarily messy. Like the artist’s workshop. The […]

  • But what do they think? What do they want us to do? Why don’t they just tell us?

    In my consulting work, it is incredibly frequent to see people stuck with a question: ‘but what do they want us […]

  • All the roads lead to Rome, but mind the axle of the car

    A friend of mine Carlos Orozco  uses this analogy. If you are driving a car and you have a puncture, you’ll try […]

  • The unsaid and unsayable are at the deeper layers of culture

    When trying to understand a culture, there will be plenty of visible things to look at, to hear and to […]

  • The minority tyranny in the organization

    Nassim Taleb’s piece in Medium some time ago entitled The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority is one […]

  • Pope Francis’ description of the 15 diseases of the Catholic Church administration apparatus (Curia) says a lot about the universal traps of human organizations

    Pope Francis, spiritual leader to 1.2 billion people, likes ‘to call a cat a cat’. He has gained a world […]

  • Lose control, to gain more control: Starting the Control Diet

    I said in yesterday’s Daily Thought that we needed to grab the (management) Paradox of Control. The more we lose […]

  • Lose control, to gain more control: The paradox and the symptoms

    The more ‘command-and-control’ you practice, the less control you actually have and the more you’ll need to command. In today’s […]

  • Collective Leadership: Two Acid Tests

    THIS THURSDAY – don’t miss our final live webinar in the ‘A Better Way’ series, when Mark Storm and I […]

  • One disruptive culture shift, five outcomes. At least. The 30/30 to 3/3 ‘unreasonable shift’.

    Imagine this goal. Let’s shift from 30 people making a decision in 30 days, to 3 people making the same […]

  • Full of Embassies: The company is not an Internal Diplomatic Service

    People in organizations spend a lot of time representing somebody else or something else. It feels sometimes that the company […]

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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 […]