List

Management Thinking and Innovation

  • ‘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 […]

  • Beware of the assumed magic properties of the word ‘Prioritize!’

    ‘Prioritize’ is a word that I particularly dislike because it is overused and  misused in a terrible way. I have […]

  • 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 […]

  • Fooled by the one-off big event

    A great deal of energy, time, attention and money is being invested in the production of the one-off, usually large, […]

  • My Russian Dolls theory of the organization

    No system can be fully understood within the system. No, this is not an esoteric statement but a simple, common […]

  • Iconic leadership: the illusion of copying a one off

    Picture this organization.  Closed culture, culture of secrecy, dictatorial CEO. Perhaps a bit unkind, but I have said before, speaking […]

  • (5/5) ‘Neuro-offerings’ have arrived in our business organizations. Bring as much critical thinking as you can when confronted with ‘scientific references’ and a stack of brain pictures.

    Back to today! Some high calibre neurologists, who, as such, have had access to very special cases of people with […]

  • (3/5) Neuro-explanations (Marketing, Leadership, Spirituality, you name it), come in Technicolor, and they sell.

    The historical interpretations of what is really going on in your head (as we saw in yesterday’s Part 2) are […]

  • (2/5) A brief history of Mind Digging. The precursors of the current Neuro-worship and Neurobable. From Psycho-explanations to Neuro-explanations.

    Each period of history has its own ‘Theory of Everything’.  Psychoanalysis occupied that space for a long time in the […]

  • (1/5) Neurobable has discovered business. God help us! The current fascination with the Neuro-Anything, worries me.

    Is the Brain-worship that we see nowadays in our business arena the new Psychoanalysis? Is the Neuro-explanation of everything, from […]

  • More on the manager-leader balancing act

    I’m on holiday for a few days. Re posting a piece than attracted interesting discussions within a group pf clients. […]

  • The battle for the 3S : Synthesis, Sense, and Simplicity

    Let me share with you my 3S, where I suggest you put your money 1. Synthesis. My followers, readers, clients, […]

  • Using national cultural differences to explain everything, is a smokescreen for managerial incompetence.

    When I see that the first port of use of managerial justification, particularly difficulties, is ‘cultural differences’, I smell a […]

  • ‘Disruptive’: a word for all seasons, in need of a holiday.

    Jill Lepore, author, staff writer at The New Yorker, and Harvard professor of American History has created a little storm, […]

  • Is the creative working unit ‘the pair’? It would be worth experimenting

    A forthcoming book by Joshua Wolf Shenk entitled ‘Powers of Two’ makes an interesting case for what the author calls […]

  • Solutionism as a culture: proficiency in problem solving

    I have become apprehensive about the use of the term ‘solutions driven’. I am a big culprit however. I have […]

  • When the only thing you have is a hammer

    ‘When the only thing you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail’ If you have a predetermined view […]

  • The three ‘magic’ words: transparency, clarity and fairness

    These three organizational ‘magic words’ manage to get mixed up a lot. It’s hard to believe because they are so […]

  • When management is overweight, leadership may be starving

    I must confess I have never been 100% comfortable with the traditional distinction by Warren Bennis between leaders and managers […]

  • ‘When the sea was calm, all boats alike; showed mastership in floating’

    This is scene one of ‘The Tragedy of Coriolanus’ by William Shakespeare. It says a lot to us. It’s easy […]

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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 […]