List

Leadership

  • My friends, the monks, secret weapon: the asterisk. I want 2015 Leadership with tons of them.

    My best friends are monks of the type that don’t talk much. So we don’t talk much. I visit them […]

  • Trivialising management recipes won’t get us anywhere. ‘Having fun’ comes at the top of the ridiculous. Referring to the NHS is ludicrous.

    A piece in The Guardian by Christina Patterson (‘writer and broadcaster’) entitled ‘The secret to an effective workforce is fun’ […]

  • 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 to they want […]

  • Scott Adams/Dilbert thinks that ‘passion’ in business success is overrated. He has a point. ‘Passion’ is a beautiful trap.

    I wrote yesterday that the success formula is ‘ Be passionate but buy the damned ticket’. I have more on […]

  • God’s answer to somebody who complained to Him that he did not win the lottery: ‘Buy that damned ticket!’ (Passionate people, take notice)

    As Woody Allen said, showing up is 80% of  life. The bookshelves, digital or otherwise, are full of ‘How-To-Succeed-In’ stuff. […]

  • Power creates serious optical problems. It makes you blind. It does it in the family, in the church, in the street, in the bedroom and the boardroom

    In the press these days there is the account of the trial in Lille of Dominique Strauss-Kahn, (also known as […]

  • Choosing between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility

    ‘Early in life I had to chose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility. I chose the former and have not […]

  • Introducing behaviours by the back door. The ‘culture of feed back’ example

    There are many ways to introduce, trigger and spread behaviours in organizations, but not many of them are effective and […]

  • 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 […]

  • Backstage Leadership™ ‘ is key to collective leadership, a cornerstone of the modern organization

    I believe that one of the fundamental types of leadership in this Century is Backstage Leadership ™  . This is […]

  • Customer memo to corporate: Not in my name.

    We do so many things on behalf of the customers! Or because the customers. Or for the customers. We reorganise, […]

  • The curious practice of ‘taking responsibility’ in the form of resigning and passing the monkey

    This a curious practice. You are in front of a mess, a business fiasco, something perhaps gone horribly wrong. The […]

  • Memo to Mr Jack Welch’s about his ‘10 lessons in leadership’.

    Dear Mr Welch: I have never been very fond of you. It’s nothing personal. Over the years, I have admired […]

  • There are off-the-shelf accounting packages to buy and use. There can’t be such a thing as an off-the-shelf Leadership Development Programme

    Avoid off-the-shelf leadership programmes. Pret-a-porter leadership development is attractive but unlikey to be a good answer. There are not universal […]

  • Leadership is not a HR topic. It’s also not outsource-able. You are stuck with it.

    Imagine this statement: Only 27% of global CFOs say they are well prepared to deal with financial management. Terrible,  isn’t […]

  • 2015 Number one leadership asset: self-criticism. Number two: unlearning. Number three…

    Charles Munger commencement speech at Harvard Business School in 1986 contains this gem of a paragraph: Most people early achieve […]

  • Trespasses will be recruited: a four-word strategy in the Battle of Ideas

    Societal issues, clash of ideologies, fundamentalism, political engagement (or lack of it), organizational innovation, Leadership 2015, no matter what direction […]

  • Leadership: still the elusive friend that refuses management captivity.

    Daily Thoughts are back in full on the 5th of January together with the pre-launch of my new book ‘However; […]

  • Thoughts on (de) cluttering, for the Christmas pause

    Daily Thoughts full steam version is back on the 5th of January. But the conversation continues. Just whispering… I guess […]

  • The best question is the one which has no answer

    Recently, I keep finding myself going back all the time to ‘the art of questioning’,  as something being at the […]

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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 […]