Many years ago I met somebody at a conference. He was one of the speakers. He told us a great […]

It’s just simply impossible to go business as usual after the Manchester events. Yet, the best thing we could do […]

In the previous Daily Thought I shared the simple idea that change management approaches often miss a big elephant in […]

The change management industry has traditionally missed a big elephant in the room: in times of change, what is actually […]

Entire organizations are kept alive and kicking by the glass-half-full-people whilst the glass-half-empty-people spend their time feeling sorry for themselves. […]

Welcome to this week’s summary (a bit earlier than usual!)   Here at Daily Thoughts HQ and The Chalfont Project, […]

Good leaders are a bit of corporate anthropologists. In fact, we are all exotics in the payroll. In my idiosyncratic, […]

Happy weekend to all our Daily Thoughts readers! This week, some of The Chalfont Project team have been at a […]

I am reviewing an old pots on our 4 Hats leadership. The trouble with the talking about leadership is that […]

Back in 2015 I wrote this. In the context of some recent conversations, I went to review the validity of […]

Today I have presented my views on Employer Branding at a conference in Berlin. The trouble with this area is […]

I have talked a lot in the past about the Neurobabble Fallacy. I know this makes many people uncomfortable. I […]

Happy weekend to our readers!   Here at Daily Thoughts HQ, social movements are one of our favourite topics…so although […]

If you followed the two previous Daily Thoughts, you would have got into the idea of ‘Managing by Segmenting Around’. […]

Exercise: take a piece of paper and put names next to each category. Use your organization or an organization you […]

This almost one year old Daily Thought has done the rounds of social media many times over!  I replicate it […]

Happy weekend Daily Thoughts Readers!   As we reach the end of another month, it seemed a good time to […]

My son, I’ll be honest with you. You can become a successful person or an alcoholic. I have to be […]

The original  is here: TED talk: Why the only future worth building includes everyone. By Pope Francis. “The Future You:” […]

Originally published a few months ago, I wanted to resend this as an opportunity to re-read and reflect. I hope […]

A dangerous metastatic cancer in organizations ( no apologies for the strong language) is the equating of ‘team’ and ‘meeting’. […]

Jeff Bezos. Amazon’s CEO, has been using the ‘Day One expression since the 1997 letter to shareholders. Now, it is […]

Happy weekend to all our readers! Here at The Chalfont Project and Daily Thoughts HQ, we have been talking a […]

Looking outside is great. Looking inside is not a good idea. It leads to navel gazing. Nombrilisme in French, more […]

Deal with /learn to navigate in ambiguity and unpredictability. We don’t have good toolkits but any investment in at least […]

Happy Easter to all our Daily Thoughts readers! We hope you are having an enjoyable weekend and that the sun […]

Since we all love conceptual frames, it is not surprising that in the area of ‘change management’ there are a […]

A couple of years ago, a client of mine in mainland continental Europe moved to new, pristine, shinny offices. Suddenly […]

Happy weekend! Welcome to part 2 of our look at behavioural change. For all the most recent posts on this […]

The secret of success revealed: it’s hard work! There you are. Now mix it with healthy ambition. And now make […]

Still in pause mode, here is a reflection from the Daily Thoughts Support team @ The Chalfont Project Two recent […]

Hi This is the Support Team  @ The Chalfont Project, behind the Daily Thoughts that Dr Leandro Herero writes personally. […]

We often hear the need to put some order in Division A, or to restructure X and Y by putting […]

Happy weekend to all our Daily Thoughts readers! This week at we have been focusing on Behaviours – after all, […]

Years ago,  political scientist Francis Fukuyama wrote about the End of History. We all are converging to ‘the end’: liberal […]

Employee satisfaction/engagement surveys are a one way traffic systems. They are about what the company gives you, or does not. […]

Or the curious phenomenon of not wanting something that you really want. Leadership is full of this stuff. We don’t […]

Somebody asked a group of senior IT people about to buy a whole new software infrastructure based on the ‘agile’ […]

Hello Daily Thoughts Readers! We hope you are all having an enjoyable and relaxing weekend. This week we are thinking […]

I used to have a paranoiac patient who tried to explain to me all the time her very special powers. […]

My recent Daily Thought (I’m now of an age when I only want to work with people who want to […]

There is a type of manager/leader who masters the art of listing what you don’t have.  We don’t have the […]

And still I get lots of people who raise eyebrows, people who look at me with a conspiracy-like smile (‘you […]

I am borrowing Ronald Reagan’s lines to remind ourselves that, as leaders in an organization, we must visualize a future. […]

Happy Sunday to all Daily Thoughts readers! This week, The Chalfont Project team have been busy working onsite with one […]

I got this insight from one of our Viral Change™  clients in the health care sector. We were talking about […]

The cost of authenticity, of being yourself, is zero. In theory, the cost of pretending you  are somebody else is […]

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

Nothing is more rewarding than having a CEO who says world-changing things in the news, and who produces bold, enlightened […]

Hello from the Daily Thoughts team! Here at HQ, we can’t quite believe it’s March already – although we are enjoying […]

Type One: This is messy. Accountabilities are not clear. The process sucks. Too many people involved. The issue to address […]

Ever since glorious Michael O’Leary CEO of Ryanair was told to control himself and get close to the customer (I […]

Is this risky enough? The modern risk manager says. This question usually sits high in many our Viral Change™ programmes. […]

The insurgent strategy may be called. It is applicable to politics and also to business. The insurgent does not play […]

Control the conversation. Control the dialogue. Don’t accept a dialogue imposed to you. Common ground is OK, but only if […]

Happy weekend from Daily Thoughts HQ! This week we wanted to send you three posts on Innovation, which we hope […]

My final topic of these 3 parts:  We have a full mythology of what can and can’t be done in […]

How to look for the enemy? It is there. It is in the form of divisional silos that don’t talk […]

When years ago McKinsey consultants produced a book entitled “The war for talent”, they successfully created the impression that talent […]

Happy weekend from Daily Thoughts support team at The Chalfont Project HQ! Leadership is always a popular subject and an […]

Follow the ones who do, who move, who try, who push.  The ones who get dirty ( and send their […]

The old saying, ‘if you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there’ (Lewis Carroll dixit) […]

I am revisiting an old Daily Thought  of 3 years ago as a reflection of how see things from the […]

Can we work on the collective and reward the individualistic? Well, sure you can, it happens every day. But it’s […]

Brand (identity), whether big brand or small brand, is a behavioural powerhouse. Strictly speaking I would say a Pull-House, because […]

It’s 1950.  Solomon Eliot Asch (1907–1996), social psychologist, runs a series of social experiments. In one, he tells students that […]

Hi, this is the support team of the Daily Thoughts on  Sunday’s duty! Refresh! This week we have been thinking […]

Random, semi-connected, unfinished thoughts on this: A so called ‘culture of feedback’ is conceptually overrated. It has become one of […]

A year and a half ago I published a list of 10 statements that can make you speak like an […]

Parachuting help is daily life in leadership of organizations. It may take the form of sending leaders from outside the […]

I propose this as the 2017 alternative to ‘How do you do?’ (correct English) or ‘Hey, how are you?, nice […]

I can’t get rid of this theme in my head. I have written about it so many times that my […]

Hello from Daily Thoughts HQ! This week we have gathered together some of our favourite posts on Backstage Leadership – […]

Uniqueness is a tough concept. I’ve got countless examples of clients pushing back  over the years. ‘Come on, this is […]

The snap short of the company as pictured in an organizational chart, is probably one of the most fictitious work […]

At some people’s request, I am revising an old Daily Thoughts on ‘solidarity’ in the work place. Solidarity is one […]

Prevention is the only serious approach. The extra problem is that all these five tracks may be partially invisible, used […]

People reading these Daily Thoughts may be used to common themes, indeed. After all, I am not writing about nuclear […]

I am (in) IT, I work for X (company) I work for X (company), I am in IT These are […]

Protests all over the world linked to a reason. Let’s take the Women’s march in January 21st In Washington. I […]

First published in November, here is an insight into peer to peer networks that got a lot of interest when […]

In the day when Tim Crook, Apple’s CEO, had to send a note to everybody in the company reminding them […]

Happy weekend from Daily Thoughts HQ! This week’s summary focuses on Activism. Something we have been seeing a lot of […]

If instead of a company, you had and led a community. If instead of employees you had internal social activists. […]

Let’s try this. Somebody who asks lots of questions becomes ‘a micro-manager’, which solves the problem of my questioning whether […]

There are many situations in organization and corporate life when either the collective or others with authority solve our decision […]

Most of what is very good comes from discarding the standard or the good itself. The best scripts I have […]

In the day when Tim Crook, Apple’s CEO, had to send a note to everybody in the company reminding them […]

“This isn’t a period, it’s a comma, in the continuing story that is America,” Obama said when leaving office. Well, […]

Hello and happy weekend from Daily Thoughts HQ! Welcome to our weekend summary post, this week focused on the power […]

(Friday 20.01.17 AD, 45th President of the USA, Inauguration Day) Conscious that this only makes sense to the Anglo-Saxon tribes […]

 Edelman Trust barometer is out again. Extraordinary piece of work. The highlights? Trust is at its lowest, everywhere. The media […]

A recent publication around the Mighty Davos meeting portrays the views of five expert academics on the topic of leadership […]

Over years of consulting, I have realised that the best leaders I know, never talk about their previous companies, what […]

Hi! This is the Daily Thoughts Support Team speaking. We hope you are all having a good weekend! Welcome to  […]

We naturally retreat to comfort zones. If we didn’t, we would not survive, physically or psychologically. We live in Confirmation […]

Years ago, I persuaded a pharmaceutical client to make three bold moves in one: (1)   To create a New Product […]

Obama’s farewell speech contains enough reflective materials, statements and arguments to spend hours of learning, no matter where you are […]

I’d like you to do this quick exercise: Part 1. Read this edited version of a summary in a 2008 […]

True thought leadership is not about conveying new ideas, showing directions for innovation and offloading the latest trends. There is […]

Business organizations have grown in a traditional alpha male model where emotions are weakness, irrationality is banned and ‘the human […]

Welcome to 2017 and the first of our weekly summary posts – this week focusing on “Critical Thinking”. We have […]

‘People like me’ is a category on its own right in the Edelman Trust Barometer. Multiple sets of data point […]

Your linguistic and behavioural frame must be in sync. Story, values and behaviours need to be solid and well connected. […]

Organizations can have the flu. And it can become epidemic. The epidemic of consensus is one. The conversation often starts […]

Your big leadership choice for 2017 is between being the guardian of what has already happened, or the prophet of […]

Back at 08:00 GMT, my alarm clock, with  ideas left behind with the community of readers, followers, clients, my global […]

Thanks to all those who voted for their favourite Daily Thoughts of 2016 – we compiled the results and here are […]

Thanks to all those who voted for their favourite Daily Thoughts of 2016 – we compiled the results and here is […]

Renounce adaptation, robustness and even ‘flexibility’ in favour of ‘taking any opportunity to do things you think you could not […]

Some leaders are very good in a crisis. They may or may not acknowledge that, but the adrenaline of the […]

The Four readiness drivers I have mentioned in previous days are: Rapid Reaction and Reconfiguration (RRR) Focus on your ‘social […]

The word ‘ready’ has at least 4 meanings in any dictionary:   1. Prepared or available for service, action, or […]

This is the famous quote by Rahm Emanuel, now mayor or Chicago and before Chief of Staff of Barack Obama: […]

In the second of our Daily Thoughts summaries this week, I focus on Organizational Culture. Read on for some examples […]

Many of you have told us that a regular summary of Daily Thoughts’ posts, focused on certain topics, would be […]

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

This is a pattern that I encounter in many of my clients. Top and less top leadership, of the progressive […]

Here we go again. I keep sounding gloomy these days. I don’t mean to. Promise. The Era of Anger, the […]

The current theory on the future of management, going around in some circles, (courtesy of Gary Hamel, somebody people pay […]

It’s official. Well, it has been now for a little while. “Post-truth” has been named Oxford Dictionaries’ 2016 international word […]

A fairly constant finding in political science experimentation (and this is a rich field completely neglected by traditional HR/OD in […]

I have found myself in full philosophical mode, taking stock. End of year I suppose. This is like a blood […]

According to The Telegraph, Mr Jeremy Hunt, Health Secretary of Her Majesty’s British Government has declared that doctors and nurses […]

This is plagiarism, of course. I am stealing 13th Century saint, Francis of Assisi’s  line: ‘Preach the Gospel all the […]

What about the leader as a designer of spaces, a social architect that creates places (physical) and spaces? Not hard […]

We all live and work in bureaucratic organizations. The differences between us is the dose. In today’s world, bureaucracy is […]

One of the most conventionally accepted theories of change, perhaps better called ‘tactics of change’, says that it is important […]

This is Rule number 13 of the just published, new book ‘Rules for Revolutionaries- how Big Organizing can change everything’, […]

From all human qualities and types of character, from all human values and personality traits, from so many character-istics of […]

I don’t like to sound gloomy. But, is the current self-centrism an epidemic of colossal proportions? Or, another way to […]

Leadership can be taught, of course, but not in the same way as teaching how to drive a car or […]

Hi there! There is a pause in Daily Thoughts today, but here are three you may have missed that we […]

‘Lasting capacity’ must be a keyword for change management and its methods. The issue today is less about how to […]

There was a time, not long ago, when people got fed up with ‘change programmes’ that faded at the speed […]

How do you make values live? Install them in a culture? Model 1: You preach them, and preach them, and […]

Audiences receive messages, whether at your Town Hall meeting or your keynote speech. Communities use what they have ‘in common’ […]

The purpose of the organization is… The objectives of the strategy are… The reason why we have restructured is… From […]

This is my compiled list of characteristics of a Wicked Problem. The term was first described  by Rittel and Webber […]

“Agency’ is the word used in social sciences to refer to the ability of an individual to act and make […]

What is happening in politics is the equivalent of what has happened to Economics years ago. Economics was based on […]

When I first read Saul Alinsky’s ‘Rules for Radicals’ a long time ago, I was impacted by a little paragraph […]

Black Swans stand for the unpredictable. I thought Brexit had occupied that space for a while. Then, well, you know. […]

Wonderful orchestra conductor, music educator and leadership speaker, Ben Zander, used to explain how he gives his music students an […]

Years ago, 2011, when we had ‘the riots’ in the streets of London, The Guardian had a tracking system for […]

A slow growth cancer in organizations. People unnecessarily and gratuitously condemning the company to an impossible future: we will never […]

Yes, we are in the era of ‘elevators pitch’, of one page formulations, a clear summary, a 140 characters message […]

There you are. This is a 25 facets supermarket of identities for Project Leaders/Product Developers/Team leaders etc. Some you’ll like […]

A CEO asked me recently: what do you do with a manager who does not embrace or support change, in […]

I think that current life cycle of a ‘best practice’ is a month, or so. And this is benevolent. In […]

Where are we going? That’s a simple question in leadership, from followers to leaders. Forgive me this non-sophisticated approach to […]

Religious leader and child molester? Beacon of moral values and having a secret affair? Anti poverty leader managing a healthy […]

Amongst the fascinating, moving, brilliant stories of health care workers in Ireland, that I have come across in the last […]

In my job as an organization architect, I travel quite a lot and therefore I stay in lots of hotels […]

Hillel the Elder, or ‘Rabbi’ Hillel, Jewish leader who died in 10 CE, is remembered outside the Jewish tradition by […]

It would be nice if we could just sit in the middle of the two in-trays, right and left, and […]

100 people get together and decided that it would good to jump off a cliff. Some people think it’s crazy. […]

The Black Swan theory says that… all swans are white, and your Strategic Swan Management Department should cater for a […]

Sometimes restructuring is done with the intention of solving a collaboration problem. A people don’t talk to B people; if […]

I’ve been in front of 2000 people in Ecuador last week. Out of 8000, all belonging to a family owned […]

I have a simple self-test to deal with the question of legacy. Own legacy, collective, as a company legacy, leadership […]

Not a long time ago, we would have considered the employee having a sort of schizophrenic mind by force. Persona […]

In a large company, what do a leadership development, a culture change and a business integration programme typically have in […]

In yesterday’s Daily Thought I suggested that leadership competence-based systems may be better at providing a language than at creating […]

In Louis Gerstner’s autobiography as chairman of IBM from 1993 until 2002, he recalls the company’s use of a competency […]

When in the not too distant future, cultural digital archaeologists will dig into the remains of the legacy of sexual […]

If I were the one in charge of deciding that ‘person of the year’ front cover in Time Magazine, or […]

These are us, you and me. Ok, apologies for calling you ordinary . But it’s not disrespectful. Believe me. It’s […]

This is my non-scientific classification of forms of ‘collective action’ (association and collaboration for a purpose, in general)  and how […]

Big L, small l, legacy is the long term outcome of leadership. There will be legacy. You’re better off shaping […]

I have had discussions with a client during the last weeks about the resistance to get rid of complicated processes […]

I am back with a favourite theme: hierarchies and power The first law of organizational hierarchical power is my version […]

A social movement is not a bunch of people, even hundreds, or thousands, moving socially. A social movement needs a […]

An organization is super rich in leadership and becomes a Leadership Lab, a School of leaders, if it has three […]

Know your strength and speak from that position. What is it? Knowledge? Expertise? Experience? Wisdom? Here are others: simplicity, communication, […]

Reinventing management to deal with the complexities of the world and, therefore, the complexities of business challenges is something that, […]

  Reorganisations often follow these phases: smell, gossip, announcement and implementation. The period between announcement and implementation is when most […]

I often think that the standard ‘diversity and inclusion’ discourse that floats around companies is a bit superficial. It stops […]

Their worlds and the laws governing them are completely different. Coaching and most management and leadership (team) development are not […]

The language of behaviours in a corporate set up is often either bland or too ‘corporatized’, sounding artificial. Many of […]

One of us or one of them. Liberal or conservative. Top-down or bottom up. Progressive or retrograde. Robust or fragile. […]

Imagine you run a large organization confronted with a future-critical, one off, Big Strategic Decision. The consequences may be dramatic, […]

A strategy review and implementation meeting takes place months after a new strategy has been launched. All goes smooth until […]

You can’t inject happiness in the organization. You can’t put happiness capsules in the water supply. You can’t prescribe happiness, […]

Some cultures a very introspective. In a healthy way. Some are pathologically introspective and spend a lot of time dissecting […]

Yuval Noah Harari uses this term in his new and excellent Homo Deus book to describe the narrow view that […]

Something short of a miracle occurs in some lucky organizations where leaders spontaneously ‘jump in’ and take over a piece […]

Madeleine Albright, politician and diplomat; former and first female U.S. Secretary of State, said in her Commencement Speech at Scripps […]

We have a problem in Division A. Leaders are not doing their job. Leaders are nor living the values. Some […]

If we needed a handy god in organizational life, somebody who could come to the rescue and have the final […]

Several articles in the British Guardian and Observer (Memo to the BBC: balance is not fairness when one side is […]

Listening to everybody’s opinions is an unquestionably healthy feature of open organizations, inclusive cultures and good leadership. But it requires […]

Following on yesterday’s Daily Thought on Employee Disengagement, in which I suggested four main sources: The video and the audio […]

I am more interested in employee disengagement than employee engagement. The journey of disenchantment intrigues me more, and interests me […]

The Robust Culture: the culture handles well internal faults and external stress. There may be internal gaps (skills, unfilled positions, […]

The art of dealing with incomplete and imperfect data: I want to put this in the water supply of some […]

Analogy stolen from the brilliant The Systems Bible (John Gall, 2003) We tend to look at problems from the angles […]

I wrote a couple of days ago that the traditional model of change ‘A to Z’ or ‘destination’ is in […]

I’ve written many times: passion is overrated. Of course I am pushing the envelop with this. Passion is the fuel. […]

The traditional model of change is the one I call ‘destination’ type, that is, how to go from A to […]

Tried and tested in political marketing/mobilization/campaigning, many times, that ‘intention to vote’ increases the probability of other people voting by […]

“A good organizer is a social arsonist who goes around setting people on fire.”—Fred Ross Fred Ross (1910-1992) American community […]

I often use Obama’s some of his 2008 speeches lines to ask leaders about their sense of destiny, small d […]

The description of some company cultures by their leaders may sound like a work of fiction by people inside. I […]

I am not worried about Donald Trump. After all he is just an individual with no decent principles, a narcissistic […]

Attention re-structuralists, strategists and people about to be sold a multi-million reorganization solution that will solve all those nasty problems […]

Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths are the authors of ‘Algorithms To Live By: The Computer Science of Human Decisions’ (2016), […]

There are two ways carry a baby – in ancient Hinduism tradition- the way of the cat and the way […]

There is no such a thing as kindness. Unless, and until, somebody does something to another human being who can […]

This is my rephrasing of ‘The army is now fully prepared for the previous war’, inspired by John Gall, in […]

A less spoken feature of great leadership is the art of managing the disappointments created by that same leadership. I […]

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

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

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

If you want to execute a strategy, you want to keep cool and move inexorably forward, and you think you […]

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

The nostalgic executive, refers constantly to the past. What she did in her previous company, how she managed to build […]

Have you ever thought of this? We speak Zoology language in management. We have more animals that one would have […]

‘The study surveyed more than 8,000 employees in Europe, North America and Asia Pacific to gain more insight on employee […]

Is cultural fit a question of hiring (or converting people into) clones? Not many people would agree. However, the question […]

If you were to list your most important people assets, above the best set of skills and competences, above the […]

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

And that can be good or bad. Usually bad. Islamic terrorists who follow strict orders from ISIS, have a plan, […]

‘Everyday is Election Day’ is an expression used in political campaigning and widely used in the masterful Obama campaigns. The […]

An old patient was concerned about her hair. A nurse came in at 7 am to put colour in her […]

We influence and indeed shape the way we do things at work, but these ways also shape us at the […]

If any business executive, head of communications function, or HR messenger, or agency communications for that matter, has any doubt […]

One of the fundamental roles of leadership is to frame the narrative of the organization. This is easy to say […]

I review my 20 rules of Leadership every few months. I have published this list in My Daily Thoughts about […]

My kingdom, my budget, my P&L, my operating expenses, my pot of money. Traditional financial management is about the efficacy […]

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

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

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

I don’t know where this comes from but it’s in posts and posters all over. It’s perhaps one of these […]

Organizational performance is unique. Cut and past does not work. You need to find your own formula. Good to hear […]

HR is a function. Well, hardly one. It’s a supermarket that has in its shelves a variety of brands, from […]

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

People creating ‘diversity and inclusion’ programmes often  have a hard time. The programme for the concert is brilliant, the music […]

Collaboration is behavioural, not a process or system. As a behaviour, it can’t be taught. It’s something that some people […]

That is the trouble of many well-intentioned ‘crowd-sourced’ rounds of input in the form of focus groups or similar. We […]

“Priming’ is an old concept. It means you can influence events by exposing people to subtle messages, colours, perhaps emotions […]

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

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

Managing uncertainty is something our brain loves to do. And it loves even more  to be helped. At macro-macro-level, Theories-Of-Everything […]

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

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

Last month I was part of a team discussion in which one of the participants, Peter, managed to put the […]

Reported in many places: The noise levels of some Intensive Care Units (ICU) in hospitals are similar to those of […]

Continuing my revised 12 laws of social change at a scale. Very simple laws apply to any large scale change […]

My revised 12 rules of social change at a scale, as presented at the Dementia Friendly Ireland days ago.  These […]

It always amazes me how much of the real purpose of the organization is often unsaid, assumed, never proper articulated. […]

Corporate storytelling has been largely dominated by heroic stories, referring to extraordinary circumstances, handled by extraordinary people. They make for […]

Sustainability of change, of cultural initiatives, of well intentioned corporate improvements is the key challenge. We all are quite energetic […]

Heraclitus (535 BCE) was probably the father of change management. Two quotes There is nothing permanent except change No man […]

These 8, self-explanatory categories of people are the natural focus of traditional HR and management systems . They are needed […]

Following on yesterday’s proposition, the new disciplines of management, ‘The New Classics’ are these 10:   1. Behavioural Economics. 2. […]

Amongst the challenges that management in the 21st Century has, which are shared, of course, by specific functions such as […]

VUCA: volatile, unpredictable, complex and ambiguous environment, term created by the military to say that the future is not what […]

In The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, ‘the answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, […]

An undetermined glitch in the system made the distribution of this Daily Thought very limited to my community of email […]

You always have the trade off between doing X, and not doing it at all. There will be a cost […]

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

There was a time, I am told, when before starting a programme or initiative within the company, you made sure […]

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

You’ve just been to a concert in the Great Hall of your city. Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 “Resurrection”. Berlin […]

Scenario 1: The Leadership Team/top Management Team is in high control mode. They feel they need to make many kinds […]

I remember last year in the US. I had given them ideas, insights, reflections. I hade shared experiences. I had […]

Read the following pairs. Notice which ones make you more comfortable. ‘Your are in a queue/line and we will respond […]

I have referred several times to Charles Munger, investor, critical thinker, ‘librarian’ (he reads more books than anybody else): we […]

I am borrowing this line from Obama’s speech at Rutgers. Of course he was referring to certain presidential candidate. “Facts, […]

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

Dear Mr Herrero. I have been trying to contact you but you were busy. No, you haven’t, we have no […]

Jack Welch, ex CEO of GE and Suzy Welch, Journalist, author and Jack’s wife have written in Linkedin, in one […]

Public sector health in many parts of the world has been financially squeezed. Committed health workers have continued to deliver […]

That traditional logic is unfortunately very weak. That logic only works if we can really find those roots. But, take […]

‘Familiarity breeds contempt’, the proverb says. But in management, it also breeds lost of content and satisfied people. We are […]

‘I am convinced that a well thought out “small wins approach” is the premier path to effective strategy implementation, and […]

A friend of mine told me a story about his laptop. It got warmer and warmer; the fan on all […]

An unexpected ‘revelation’ by Facebook (also known as the mother of all algorithms) gives us an important insight about the […]

I’ve learned this quote from an excellent article in The Guardian by Jonathan Freedland about ‘post-truth politics’ (Post-truth politicians such […]

Something went wrong in the room allocation in my hotel. When I arrived to the corridor in the 3rd floor […]

Neuroscientists at the Advance Brain Research Institute in Minnesota have found that there is a direct connection between ‘intention to […]

A good article came to me via my colleague Caroline, always ready to save some gems form my spam filter […]

It is perhaps the Age of Inversion. The weights have gone the other way. Globalization, big G, or small g, […]

Don’t leave around a floating opinion, ended by ‘in my opinion’, not leading anywhere in particular. That is just use […]

The main reason why many cultural change and transformation programmes in large organizations fail is because you can’t change ‘the […]

Option 1: You try to convince him with rational and emotional explanations about the need for change and the importance […]

It’s been a while now since the world of HR/OD/Management/Consulting has realised that ‘top down’ (stuff) is not politically correct […]

An in depth analysis of the world of ‘Digital Transformation’ shows two things. One is that there is no such […]

Every morning in my neighbourhood there is a small window of time when traffic becomes chaotic, slow, painful and frustrating. […]

Culture is not a project, something to do on top of normal work, an extra, something to get your hands […]

Have you heard of speed yoga? Me neither. Although Mr Google points to some YouTube that in fact are yoga […]

If you are in the consumer behaviour field (marketer, researcher, advertising expert, brand strategist) you will not work with a […]

I also don’t want bystanders, people who give diagnosis but would not have a clue about treatment, people who dwell […]

Promise. There is more to gain from many bad, irrational, uncooked, unrealistic ideas popping up and rejecting them so that […]

Have you noticed how many employees seem to be in ‘one employer behind time zone’? They never left the previous […]

OK, a bit harsh, but this is what I mean. Some people are very good at this. ‘We have a […]

Harvard Business Review (HBR) never ceases to amaze me. Very often I feel that there is some sort of a […]

If leadership is a praxis (see yesterday’s Daily Thought), something that ‘I’ do (name and surname here, please), then, knowing […]

Any label that could be equally applied to Mother Theresa, Hitler, your CEO, Kim Jong-un, Mandela, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, and […]

I have come to the conclusion that most executive education of any reputation and high fees, is based upon five […]

Plato told us in his Symposium that humans were originally androgynous, not men or women. They became so powerful that […]

  Here is a description of a wolf pack that has been in circulation since the end of last year. […]

‘In the long run my observations have convinced me that some men, reasoning preposterously, first establish some conclusion in their […]

In my world, ‘corporate’ is synonymous of big structure, big processes and big systems. Of course it is not its […]

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

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

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

There are very few rules in Behavioural Sciences. If we were to write an ABC of Psychology, A would look […]

The project team has been complaining for a long time of their lack of empowerment. They have a lot of […]

When too many decisions are pushed upwards in the organization, and the top layers of leadership complain about it, often […]

A specialist nephrologist I know well says to me: I get very nervous with all this heart stuff, I don’t […]

Lessons from the Pre-CIA ‘Simple Sabotage Field Manual’ (declassified, in case you wonder). This is how it goes: General Interference […]

For me, the quality of statesmanship inversely correlates with the number of times you blame the enemy, or others, of […]

‘Let’s be real and aware of the current budget realities’ is a warning that leaders should give to their people […]

The fastest and best way to build a creative culture is to have lots of creative people together. No kidding. […]

I’ve come across by chance a short video interview with Tony Robbins, life coach, health guru, motivational speaker, author, self-made […]

Manners is an old fashion concept. Courtesy, consideration, empathy with the other? All in one? Manners are the behavioural expression […]

OK, the real title of this post is ‘Landscapes of ideas vs categories of actions. Tapestry of behaviours vs. culture. […]

It was just a little over a year that I wrote that annual Performance Management needed to be retired. I […]

Political commentators in the US have argued that Donald Trump’s campaign is a protest one, attracting people who are against […]

‘Daily Thoughts’ is in pause mode for a few days and will resume with new content on Monday 4th of […]

‘Daily Thoughts’ is in pause mode for a few days and will resume with new content on Monday 4th of […]

‘Daily Thoughts’ is in pause mode for a few days and resumes on Monday 4th of April. You may have […]

‘Daily Thoughts’ is in pause mode for a few days. You may have missed some of these. Here is a […]

‘Daily Thoughts’ is in pause mode for a few days.. You may have missed some of these. Here is a […]

‘Daily Thoughts’ is in pause mode for a few days. Here is a quick way to continue some thinking during […]

As some of us punctuate this time of the year (Happy Easter!) it is also a time for the Daily […]

Who goes to HR conferences? HR people. Who goes to Communication conferences? Communication Directors, Managers and Heads. Who goes to […]

Jerry B Harvey’s 1974 article “The Abilene Paradox: The Management of Agreement’, contains this vignette. On a hot afternoon visiting […]

The modern organization is fluid. People are not necessarily assigned to one place, one team, even one single role. The […]

In my dealing with organizations of many sizes and shapes, cultures and geographies, I always find very fine individuals of […]

We have a phenomenal challenge in France. Our people there ‘don’t get the values’, are very cynical and, to make […]

There is an anecdote in a recent piece by Noemi Klein’s in The Guardian. A young girl had some kind […]

The prestigious publication ‘The Economist’ has published an article under the title ‘Team spirit. Businesses are embracing the idea of […]

In his 2003 book ‘The Audacity of Hope’, Barack Obama wrote: ‘I serve as a blank screen on which people […]

‘Recruiters spend 6 seconds evaluating individual online resumes/CVs’ That’s it. Six. The self-reporting by recruiters indicated 4-5 minutes, but using […]

Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, software millionaire, has discovered mindfulness. And has installed ‘mindfulness rooms’ in the Salesfore building in […]

We often tend to mistake these in organizations Trends: See, hear and feel what is going on, and find patterns […]

Experiment. Not kidding. Once upon a time ‘experimenting’ was something that only scientists did. Most people would associate the word […]

The old tale of ‘Boiling Frogs’ says that there are too basic ways to boil a frog. One, the frog […]

The Biblical ‘the truth will set you free’ should be engraved in corporate walls, next to the values. And in […]

Scholars of social movements have noticed and described how people often create a stronger and faster sense of association and […]

‘Continuous improvement’ is part of the management furniture and something that, at a face value, one could not disagree with. […]

Yes to all. All of the above. Who could disagree? Certainly not the leadership development sub-industry. We want the good […]

I have had today the privilege of meeting Dr Kate Granger, founder of the #hellomynameis campaign, and a terminally ill […]

Warning: This statement will be dismissed But, before you do that, I’d ask you to consider the differences between ‘organizational-business […]

In caricature, this is a 3 point strategy to develop further. It’s a simple mental and practical frame. Build an […]

Ah, the customer is back, some people in management and consulting say, as if the customer had been in a […]

Although our work on large scale behavioural change in organizations started the same day that The Chalfont Project company was […]

Paraphrasing ( better, stealing from) American anthropologist Clifford Geertz (1926-2006) a corporate culture, or, I would say, a subculture that […]

When travelling today, I found myself, unexpectedly, a few minutes from a little known restaurant, part of a low key, […]

Let’s start somewhere else. What is the logic behind Listmania? Very often there isn’t one. But starting a note/blog/communication with […]

There is a theme in many traditions that describes ‘the way’ as something that is not simply ’there’ but that […]

Behavioural /cultural shaping in organizations does not scale up by simply the leaders having the right mindset and motivation. A […]

Leading a meeting for the purpose of building a team (on top of achieving some business goals) may include a […]

A short piece in The Guardian announces quietly that Mercedes Benz is replacing some robots with humans. Not the other […]

OK, at least you a reading. Thanks. The organization is a network. Networks have emergent properties. Translation: things come up […]

Communicating, triggering behaviours, sustaining them and creating a culture, are all connected, interdependent, overlapping and parts of the chain of […]

10 key behavioural competences of people to understand what is going. Small sample of my collection. These are 10 type […]

Our box is incredibly sophisticated. It has the latest quality walls, sofas, working spaces and lots of meeting rooms. I […]

What is a normal conversation? Well, pick one or combinations: football, how the kids are doing, the pain of the […]

Model 1. The technology, for example in the form of digital platforms such as Enterprise Social Networks, ESN (Yammer type) […]

Leaders. They drive the agenda, the agenda is not driving them. They drive the agenda even when other people think […]

Each large or not that large organization needs one. This tribe is composed by people who have a natural ability […]

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that […]

Don’t look at us, at the leadership at the top. We are the wrong mirror. Of course, we are committed […]

One of the key rules of activism (social, political, cause) is not to spend more than the minimum necessary time […]

From time to time you see the occasional and mostly not very solid comparisons between ‘the company’ and a religion. […]

Strong thinking and strong ideas are great. We need people to defend them, champion them and feel passionate about them. […]

Organizations need a Rapid Reaction Force. OK, unless you are in the military, it does not mean military fatigue uniforms […]

The job description is dead. It is replaced by a Lego box, no instructional manual and a map. Welcome to […]

More than 20 years ago, Jerry I. Porras and James C. Collins, wrote the bestseller ‘Built to Last, successful habits […]

Well known Conservative American columnist and writer David Brooks has written a piece in the New York Times entitled ‘I […]

The language of leadership is often plain and monotone. Used to explain slides and with a screen behind, leadership language […]

At some point of the organization’s growth, complexity kicks in. Before that threshold, you had two problems: managing growth and […]

Employee engagement efforts, ownership values and empowerment behaviours must meet at one point. It’s simple, not terribly controversial, based upon […]

After the third reorganisation and the fourth quality programme and the second change management initiative, the cry is loud: give […]

In my organizational consulting work, and in behavioural terms, I am very used to be told, and challenged, that there […]

We all have our share of ‘difficult people’. Conventional management of change has taught us that there is always going […]

There is business and, then, there is all that stuff about leadership and teambuilding. This seems to be the worldview […]

Perhaps because costumer focus was not enough, we created customer centrism. Apparently this is no enough and we now need […]

‘We are reorganising in Business Units to meet customer expectations’. Actually, not, no customer has called you to ask you […]

A report on the Future of Jobs by the World Economic Forum compares the skills priorities of 2015 with the […]

This is an obvious desideratum. But very often it’s unrealistic. Conventional management approaches tell us that we have to communicate […]

Sure, you need change at the top. You wish to see that the top leadership takes things seriously and that […]

That ‘big change requires big actions’ is the commonly held belief that is behind the majority of so-called ‘large interventions’ […]

Feeling trapped, is at the core of some aspects of one’s mental health, and also organizational distress. The deep awareness […]

Gold leadership, is the one above silver and bronze, that is. Sorry if you were expecting a very sophisticated definition. […]

What should employees be loyal to? Ask an average leader: to the company, of course. Loyalty may be disguised. It […]

No what it’s written in procedures but what is not written in those pages Not how people behave in meetings, […]

John Le Carre, British ex secret intelligence serviceman, espionage writer, dixit. He knows about danger, and apparently about the danger […]

Consoled only by having bought the book for £ 0.09 ( and £2.80 postage) in Amazon marketplace, the reality is […]

I don’t think ‘rethinking the enterprise’ is anything new. You could argue that the history of management has this rethinking […]

If you push me for a articulation of human relationships, everything is transactional. But in a more specific way, transactional […]

This is an old joke and a current non-joke. Here is the story copied from one of the multiple write […]

Entrepreneurs develop ideas and create a structure around them in order to achieve goals. As Seth Godin would say, they […]

Probably we will not go back to the telegraph, but when everything is ‘innovatively disrupted’, where will we go? At […]

Life in organizations is not usually very rich in Critical Thinking. In fact, from all sectors and areas of activity, […]

Some people in organizations believe that they are working in a very bureaucratic, hierarchical, political and rigid environment. Many of […]

Unless we call ‘problem ‘to any management activity, as many people do even without acknowledging it, and, in which case, […]

Forget work-life balance. It was a good concept that did a lot of good but has now retired. It cannot longer […]

Field notes: Reflections on ‘us and them’. Sometimes a rejection of something makes its alternative appealing even if that alternative […]

The following line will short cut months of (building) ‘alignment’, integration, reorganization, team building, coalition building, start-up get-to-know, redeployment of […]

Welcome back to a New Year and its rituals of resolutions, reviews and fresh starts. For some, and I hope […]

I declare myself allowed to use the word bullshit, which official definition is nonsense, lies, exaggeration, foolish talk, pretentious talk, […]

Many restructuring efforts, perhaps process re-engineering (whether these days you call them like this or not) and a great deal […]

  There are many versions of the same principle. We spend disproportionate amounts of time on issues. We often have […]

I want to start 2016 Daily Thoughts with this word. Possibilities. This is Daily Thought number 581, and the first […]

  Happy Christmas! Daily Thoughts is in pause mode. 580 Daily Thoughts later, we are going for a bit of […]

Daily Thoughts goes into pause mode. 580 Daily Thoughts later, we are going for a bit of maintenance. Stay tuned. […]

Repeating from Part 1: Management evolution has overdone it in some species and is now weak, even in survival mode […]

Management evolution has overdone it in some species and is has become weak, even in survival mode in others,. Here […]

Our traditional management education has almost 100% focused on the formal organization, the structural fabric of teams, divisions, groups, committees […]

The German car manufacturer has reported that ‘it has detected a mindset in some areas of the company that tolerated […]

There is a romantic view of the organization that sees it completely borderless, inside and outside. Inside, this view says, […]

Henry Ford said that you could have ‘any colours of a car as long as it’s black’. The colour to […]

There are always people who ‘don’t get it’, are against cultural change efforts, do not support a programme, torpedo it, […]

(1) If the top leadership of the company does not leave to expectations, and don’t exhibit the values/behaviours that you […]

Employee empowerment is an output, an outcome. If you start thinking of employee empowerment as an input, something you are […]

The trouble with consensus is that it contains all the risks of poor thinking and all the possible cognitive biases, […]

Since I spend a considerable amount of my client work time dealing with value systems and their much needed translation […]

‘It has been proven that people with more birthdays live longer’. Is this is a line belonging to so called […]

Chinese proverb that is, what else? I wish we could be as crystal clear when it comes to the characteristics […]

I started these Daily Thoughts about 565 days ago, give or take, or at least this is the number of […]

Facts: abysmal sales in the supermarket chain, strong competitor activity, decrease customer loyalty. Guess what, new CEO Analysis: old fashion […]

Oh! We love diagnosis! Battalions of experts are ready to tell us about the 5 issues and the 3 risks […]

Many organizations claim that they have a problem with decision making. Maybe, or maybe not. There are at least three […]

Socrates was then one who came up with the ‘unexamined life is not worth living’. (And then he chose to […]

Noise Amplifiers. These people will pick up a little piece of problem, a little noise, a little breath of restlessness […]

If anybody tells you that they have the answer, then probably don’t understand the question This is how the late […]

I have always been a bit wary of people who repeatedly define themselves by what they are against. It makes […]

Somewhere along the line in the history of ‘business’, something went wrong and people took the wrong turn at the […]

You are stuck when confronted with dilemmas. Maybe  contradictory business decisions, or maybe the need to chose between two evils. […]

Three bad news people: People who sell discontent. They become experts. You may have an entire internal Sales Force of […]

We can do much better than this. But we don’t. On the contrary, we exploit these platitudes and repeat them […]

Yesterday I offered 10 types of people that challenge the status quo in organizations. I also mentioned that our mind […]

Who challenges in organizations? People who have nothing to lose People who know that the art of challenging, equals not […]

The writer Nicholas Carr said about the influence of the Internet in the way he wrote and, in general, in […]

The closest thing to designing and building an organization is the designing and building a house. You can build a […]

An article on the Apple culture ( What Apple employees say about the company secretive culture? ) is a fascinating […]

I while ago I wrote that the ultimate form of Employee Engagement is a Company of Volunteers. In a ‘company […]

In a recent conference, the very sharp mind of Marten Mickos, CEO of HackerOne, ex HP, ex Nokia, reminded the […]

The best way to help dysfunctional families to get out of their habits and become functional is not an army […]

‘The exercise was very rich, everybody participated deeply, the walls were full of flipcharts with stuff. So may ideas floating […]

‘Change management’ usually forgets a vital component: the things that don’t change or need to change, or, indeed, must not […]

The thoughts are with Paris   Liberté, égalité, fraternité Liberty, equality, fraternity

This is my alternative to the Gallup 12. You can develop a whole Organizational Development philosophy around these questions. These […]

Modern and not so modern ‘social movements’ with or a without business proposition are portrayed as a concerted and positioned […]

Fear of losing control is a funny thing. It does not seem to correlate with how much control you have […]

For CEOs, CFOs, CHROs, and other Cs, and Divisional Ds’, survey after survey try to identify their focus, their concerns, […]

Peter Drucker put it in his own style: ‘No organization can depend on genius; the supply is always scarce and […]

Customer: buys your product, once, or twice, pays, that’s it. Thanks User: buys your product, once, or twice, pays, uses, […]

Back from a conference on ‘technology and management’ (Drucker Forum, Vienna), I realise how futile some discussions on ‘technology’ are. […]

I wish I remember the Anthropology book where I got this. I should, because these days I read 50% anthropology […]

The person who fails the most wins Seth Godin dixit. Investors who make less mistakes win Warren Buffet and Charles […]

If I told you that you have in your organization a small number of employees who have greater influence than […]

These are 3 sisters sometimes seen together in the corridors of the organization. But, more often, they wander around on […]

We spent more time on preparing for doing than in doing. That would be good if we were just talking […]

‘Management’ is like a cocktail party. Some people may get a little bit excited; others certainly drink too much, talk […]

How many times I’ve seen in my clients the high expectations about new people. Not just the new hires but […]

We talk a lot about silos in organizations usually in the context of Business Units of divisions. But these are […]

Four types: The generosity of the traffic light. Every fixed interval, it let’s you get through. Even it changes colours […]

Random thoughts: People content with average achievements in the market, launch a party when the statistics show a few points […]

No matter how disguised, how avoided, how much of other language used, Employee Engagement as a topic assumes an input/output […]

These 10 positions provide organizational solutions with guarantee of some good reception. All of them are ‘possible’. If you want […]

Perhaps one of the most difficult things a leader has to do is to be mindful of his/her own thinking. […]

There are three major sources of trust generation. Everything else is commentary: The ‘keep promises’. I can rely on you, […]

In my work as Organization Architect, I deal with clients of many sizes, shapes and colours over the years. I […]

As far back as 2006, it feels like a century, I developed a frame of Leadership that could help understand […]

Amongst the beautiful poems that Constantine P. Cavafy (1863-1933) wrote, I have always found some which could go straight to […]

Stage 1: The Accidental Management team. The team is composed by whoever reports to the top. You are in that […]

A little epidemic of ex-fringe and peripheral organizations, views and people is going on around us. I use ‘fringe’ and […]

The facts: the American TV series ‘Homeland’ has reached its fifth season , starting staged in a Syrian refugee camp […]

We often use the term ‘chemistry’ as something that you need to have, between people, for example, or something that […]

Passion is an emotion, or set of emotions. You may want, indeed, that your people are passionate, but you can’t […]

Where is home? Ask this question to an Irishman or Irish woman. Even if they have been living abroad for […]

“Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.” Oscar Wilde It’s hard to have a conversation […]

In a study conducted with Fortune 100 companies, and quoted in Sherry Turkle’s new book ‘Reclaiming Conversations’, the following statistics […]

When I see a corporate value system containing teamwork, openness and innovation, my cynical, uneducated and undomesticated baloney detector system […]

The Great Man Theory was born in Scotland, the child of philosopher and historian Thomas Carlyle (1795 –1881) – “The […]

Method is a trick that has been used twice, people say. Having a method for anything is hardly a negative […]

The ‘expectations muddle’ of empowerment has different shapes and flavours: I expect you to do something but you don’t think […]

Some top management teams and leadership teams are created by the Internal Organization Chart Robot Officer, that is, they are […]

Talking about leadership teams at the top, I often hear ‘they launch those words but the don’t give specifics’, or […]

That’s how Gregorio Maranon put it. Maranon (1887-1960) was a Spanish physician of the ‘humanistic school’. Meaning, more than a […]

Scholars of social movements and also of all forms of radicalization processes agree that, quite constantly, there seems to be […]

We have made conversations inside the organization (only?) purely transactional. There must be a utility. What’s the goal? What’s the […]

In the old Greek tragedies, when the plot became an unsolvable mess, a God (or few of them) came down […]

A few years ago, community workers for the Save the Children organisation, an internationally recognised non governmental organisation or NGO, […]

Company: Where companions are. Companion = com + panis in Latin, that is with bread, sharing bread of food. “Travelling […]

Get the best minds and hearts people. Get them together. Not permanent, but more than simply ad hoc. Let them […]

Trust is the most unforgiving, unfair and disruptive phenomenon in the organization. It takes a while to build, it may […]

Volkswagen has declared that the Diesel fiasco and the massive installation of software, built in to deceive outputs and pass […]

In an unusual break between meetings in London, I found myself in Foyles, the transformed, iconic bookstore, where I bought […]

I am reconstructing here a fictitious reply from a middle-senior manager to his CEO, in the way he expressed to […]

The concept of disruption in management has been applied to innovation before. A disruptive innovation is a technology, process or […]

Walk the talk’ is being consistent: say something and then do what you said you would. ‘Talk the walk’ is […]

I am paraphrasing British philosopher Simon Blackburn who said the same about scientists entering the temple of philosophy. There is […]

Poor American management, they always get the hit. Blame it to their influence and visibility. Is most modern management American […]

Often you see people in organizations disillusioned with changes, considering themselves survivors of the yet another reorg, getting on with […]

The best swordsman in the world doesn’t need to fear the second best swordsman in the world; no, the person […]

What type are you? How our mental models work is part of the Minimal Introspection, something we tend to overlook, […]

You can’t rule on pride, things to be proud of. You can’t launch ‘be proud’ as a value, or as […]

In another context, I wrote about company cultures as having a glue. [The Company Global One Culture does not exist. […]

Corporate grade, reporting lines and membership of leadership teams in organisations often go together. But unbundling these components is a […]

I explained yesterday that ‘team = meeting’ is a cancer in organizations. We have fallen into the trap of making […]

  There is a debate, not only here in the UK, about how to call the ‘so called’ Islamic State, […]

Crisis are/constitute inflection points. Also M&A, extraordinary organic growth, relocations, and entering new markets. Keep adding. Pain is inevitable, misery […]

Nasim Taleb’s Antifragile book has this subtitle: ‘Things that gain from disorder’. This is a model for the new organization […]

Traditional management has focused on interventions that scale by the maths of addition. Modern, new radical management focuses on ways […]

Command and control management has less and less friends, and it’s quite terminally ill as well. The heirs are fighting […]

In Double Down: Game Change 2012, the detailed account of the USA presidential campaign of that year, by Mark Halperin […]

Organizations, like organisms, have embedded mechanisms of survival, of growth and also of self-sabotage These are 3 self-sabotage systems to […]

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

Here are my top five,  from my organizational consulting work. The paraphrasing is mine, the ownership is shared with my […]

Einstein said, “I soon learned to scent out what was able to lead to fundamentals and to turn aside from […]

This is old Psychology lesson. ‘External locus of control’ translation: the problem is somewhere else, not me. It’s the environment, […]

Whatever he had in mind, it was communicated in an incredibly poor way. The prize for messaging goes to Amazon […]

A recent book by ex-Microsoft researcher and now MIT prof Kentaro Toyama (Geek Heresy, 20015) is not precisely novel on […]

  Thomas Hylland Eriksen is a Norwegian Anthropology professor that has achieved more than  any of his fellow anthropologists: you […]

Who needs walls when we have screens? There is open plan and open plan. Open plan with Dilbert cubicles is […]

Only when you see Performance Management as rituals, you can understand why we still do them in the same unchanged […]

‘Sustainable’ is a magic word. Inevitable seat at the table of of ‘correct language’, 21st Century version. Many things have […]

Empirically, it works. It has been mentioned in many places. But the false semi-god of managerial efficiency makes us feel […]

Why have Larry Page and Sergey Brin produced the Alphabet rabbit out of the hat? They had no choice ( […]

Daily Thoughts is back the 24th of August, daily again at 08:00 am UK time in www.leandroherrero.com and then in […]

Si (Sisan Si Alhir) has organised a webinar in which Leandro Herrero will be talking about ANTIFRAGILITY:POWERED BY VIRAL CHANGE™ […]

Whilst Daily Thoughts is still in pause mode, here is another short list of Daily on Complexity. Every successful company’s […]

Whilst Daily Thoughts is on holiday for a few days, here is a short collection of Daily Thoughts on Simplicity. […]

Thanks for you daily following via email, LinkedIn Pulse or twitter. I am in a little pause for a couple […]

  List your competitors, then, compare yourself with a different list. Most of the answers lie outside your immediate peer […]

I shared yesterday the tragedy of the obvious. The obvious that is so obvious that we don’t see it. Read […]

A man was leading a caravan of donkeys and crossing the border almost every day, coming back with apparently the […]

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

If you look at political marketing, and a place to look for a serious PhD in communications and their segmentation […]

I don’t think Employee Engagement is a score following a survey, or a series of pulpits for ‘employee voice’, or […]

Short reflection, again, for the slow-down period of Daily Thoughts. When intending to obtain A, how many times do we […]

Did we ever, ever have more facts around us? Certainly not. We talk about Big Data. It is of course […]

I like the word seducing when referring to working for somebody, a company, a person, a cause, an organization. If […]

There is so much to fix and manage inside the organization that the task could be never ending. Soon, and […]

Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, has a famous and well quoted line: ‘It’s just Day one’ (of the company). And […]

With more time, the report would be shorter, the powerpoint file smaller, and the strategic plan slimmer. Not longer, bigger […]

The great Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset wrote about the early 20th Century Spanish society as being ‘led by […]

There is something quite pompously called ‘the fundamental attribution distortion’, one of the bias or mental traps that are in […]

Continuing the conversation on leadership. Yes, we could go forever. Let me make an assumption: that miraculously you’ll have some […]

There are may ways to list our own assets. And that is something very healthy to do. Practice it from […]

Commenting on the communist legacy, a soviet academic Oleg Bogomolov, who must have known a thing or two about things […]

Months ago I found myself in front of a large audience composed by the highest ranks of the HR function […]

There is a great difference between copying and reverse engineering. Many people in business wish they could copy the great […]

Complacency is always a risk, more so when we profess to be immune to it. Sometimes, achieving organizational and business […]

Imagine a near nirvana, perfect scenario in which you have the right and the best people in the organization, intellectually, […]

Ok, the method never dies, because ‘it’s a trick used twice’. People wanting to go from A to Z need […]

It has always been a Great Hypothesis. It goes like this: ‘if employees acted as owners, as if they owned […]

My  friends, monks of a Benedictine monastery in the Highlands, Scotland, spend most of the time in silence. I mean, […]

We all were born as questions. The old saying that ‘children enter school as question marks and leave as full […]

The following are not the same: What you want to measure What you need to measure What you have been […]

  Managers are good at messaging and communicating. Ok, this is a benevolent assessment but let’s assume this. Also, OK […]

The trouble with the talking about leadership is that we have made a big basket of it, and thrown in […]

We rate hotels and restaurants in Tripadvisor, we now can rate doctors and teachers, and we rate lots of services […]

Nassim Taleb Antifragile concept is perhaps one of the most attractive frames (conceptual, philosophical, practical) we have had recently. By […]

Open the windows. Ok, it’s not your room, so you can’t. Don’t get in. Avoid the room. If you need […]

At the beginning of our Viral Change™ programmes, moons ago, we were worried about a few things. One in particular […]

Confronted with options and strategies, the cost of doing things is very often the first thing that comes to our […]

Since we never solve problems completely, only make tradeoffs between them, it would be good to choose problems before they […]

Probably we will never be short of data anymore. We even have now Big Data, with big capitals, as a […]

The Business Partner concept or model was developed particularly for HR by Ulrich and Brockbank in 2005 to stress the […]

There is a ‘meeting expectations’ cult in business. It has created its own concept of (customer) services: meet customer expectations, […]

Organizational anthropology sounds like a grandiose academic affair. You may imagine the anthropologists armed with notebooks and cameras capturing the […]

I’ve written several times about the tired distinction between management and leadership. It had its logic and purpose, and made […]

Data obtained by newspapers in the UK has shown that a summit against rape in war zones held in London […]

There are about 200 people in the organization. But 10 of them at the top are very powerful. In fact, […]

‘For every problem, the Victorians have a building’. For every idea that we need to carry forward, we invent an […]

I know of a brilliant medical doctor who, in front of a worried patient, perhaps with some imaginary worries, perhaps […]

For years, middle management has been targeted by executives, business leaders, business gurus and so called ‘change experts’ as the […]

I sometimes think that many global ‘one company’ initiatives are missing the point. The intentions are good: ‘look, we are […]

Working in a ‘non-place place’ can’t deliver inspirations and aspirations. Ideas need infections, not Isolation Clinical Units Marc Auge is […]

Leadership is a term that describes a relationship. No relationship, no leadership. Leadership can only be defined in terms of […]

We all know these two types of people. The ‘there is plenty of time to review X or finish Y’ […]

Temperature control of the cabin is used by airlines in transatlantic flights as a way to change behaviour. It may […]

Do I really, really, really need to attend that meting? Do I really, really, really need to send one from […]

1. They don’t read blogs entitled ‘5 things very successful leaders have in common’. 2. They don’t care about lists […]

A friend of mind remembers one of his bosses very well. ‘Make the numbers’, was apparently his way to say […]

When I classified Employee Engagement into six models, I made the point that one overriding classification is the binary ‘with […]

Winston Churchill said, referring to the Houses of Parliament in the UK, ‘We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us’. […]

In a massive street demonstration for Anti Something Big, you have the Anti Something Big activists, the Anti Everything, the […]

I don’t copy and paste in my blogs, little or a lot. But today it’s an exception. This is Fox […]

So you have The Process and The Outcome dating. You would have thought that they are having a good time. […]

When we developed Reboot! a while ago as an intense Accelerator (strategy and change accelerator), a simple premise was in […]

I wrote yesterday that magnetism should be incorporated to the category of Prize Winner in corporate cultures: ‘I want to […]

To lead a Magnet Place (‘I’d love to be there, work there’, ‘I’d love to be part of it’, ‘I […]

Pope Francis has done it again. I mean, his probably weekly plain English (well, Italian or Spanish) bit of nudging […]

  The cartoon has been all over the place. There is a sad side of the funny side and the […]

Some organisations, or groups inside the organisation, suffer from lack of self belief. You could say weak self esteem. The […]

he British journalist, Bryan Appleyard called Gladwellism: the hard sell of a big theme supported by dubious, incoherent but dramatically […]

Clicktivism is a form of digital /online engagement that requires the extraordinary effort of one of your fingers, possibly the […]

I wrote about Zappos and Holacracy here, and got lots of questions. This is take two. In my work on […]

Promoting Parallel Monologues don’t make up employee engagement. A rich world of parallel monologues, don’t make even a poor employee […]

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

The so called One Global Culture is a confederation of (a) Geographical cultures and sub-cultures (Italy, USA, France etc) (b) […]

The perfect state of a healthy organization is unfinished. Like a human being. ‘Born too early’ (Campbell’s hero). Finished structures […]

I have explained to a client the logic and principles of the Viral Change Platform. I did not want to […]

People look up. What the immediate boss does and says. What ‘management’ do and say. In some cultures, this is […]

Every new form of management, or organizational structure and model, contains all the old mechanisms of management and organizational models. […]

A previous Daily Thought about decisions mentioned 3 reasons why decision making may be a problem in the organization (1) […]

Despite being repeated thousand times, hiring processes are still quite imperfect. Of course there are many places in which this […]

Many problems with decision making inside the company can be attributed to three causes: 1. Bad process 2. Good processes […]

It could be argued that ‘silos’ are part of the human condition and group interaction, and Chris Rodgers (Informal Coalitions) […]

Mathematizable thinking is like soldiers building a frontier with razor wired walls. There is an enclosed world and a world […]

Years ago, when in corporate life and corporate payroll (yes, I was, before funding The Chalfont Project), we, non -Americans, […]

The oil industry leaders/workers/people in the payroll who triggered the BP oil spill disaster, knew the rules, knew what needed […]

It is said that in any organization, 20% of the people do 80% of the work. I often think that […]

Robustness has always been a logical desire when it comes to the company and its culture in particular. But too […]

Paul Krugman, professor, journalist and Nobel Prize, in his column in the New York Times has mentioned an economic analogy […]

There have been clear losers in the UK General Election yesterday. People who should go back and do a good […]

Viral Change™: Our social movement platform plus ‘Operating System’ is 15 year old this year. When we started to work […]

1. These 9 features (below) define a good manager in Google. 2. You have Google as a model company ( […]

There is a difference between listening and just waiting to speak. You can spot people doing either. Some people don’t […]

Innovation and renewal requires your windows open to the world. Plenty of organizations out there are experimenting with models, far […]

The UK general election is in its final days. Even if you don’t live in the UK, what is happening […]

In any organization they are positive deviants (deviants from expected norms, who achieve results ) and other ‘statistical abnormalities’, by […]

Groupthink arrives when the group agrees with itself on everything, dismisses the external ones who disagree, ignores warnings, ignores facts, […]

A budget cut is a budget cut. Everybody recognises one when in front of one. Organizations don’t impose them just […]

‘Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end; then stop’. That was Lewis Carroll advice […]

Knowledge management was an idea hijacked by IT. When management of knowledge became buying the Mother of All Portals, and […]

In some organizations, daily life and the day to day meetings feel like a Permanent Focus Group. People spend their […]

The Business English language (yes, there is one) uses the word accountability often associated to the word ‘taking’, as in […]

Stanislaw Andreski ( 1919-2007) in his little big book ‘Social Science as Sorcery’, writing about the influence of the social […]

We offered a client unlimited support for a project, for a fixed cost. The clienr understood. Corporate Procurement didn’t. It […]

There was a time when the logic of things started with a why, followed with a what and ended in […]

We need to improve communication is not the same as this is what we need to do to improve communication, […]

The company is too big to change. We are too small to compete. It’s too early for a Leadership Development. […]

I have asked many times to list them. Here they are: 1. There is no change unless it is behavioural […]

‘Powerful oversimplifications’ was the term used by Bruce Henderson, founder of the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) to define the matrixes, […]

I wrote before that if you have some doubts about some data, you just have to say that it comes […]

  These are ‘functions’ and ‘structures’ in need of spaces in the organization. You may not be brave enough, or […]

In the words of a pioneer of Psychology, we’d be better off grabbing the reality of humanity for what it […]

Arriving at the clean and clinical Stockholm airport, my pre-booked taxi is failing me. I have some time to spear […]

Is this what people want? Singing along what the Big Gurus have provided? Music and lyrics? Some times I feel […]

In WWII there was a curious episode of injection of critical thinking, not entirely well publicised. Big airplanes bombers in […]

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

We call it character assassination for a reason. It’s the ultimate attack. The attack to the uniqueness of an individual, […]

This is a quote repeated hundred times, attributed to hundred people, reproduced in hundred posters and that you can find […]

Many of us spend quite a lot of our time in what we call ‘work’. The business day has now […]

In the organization, ‘people mobilization’ is the name of the game It is the working title of one of my […]

The 1966 Spring/Summer (special) issue of Social Text, an academic, “fashionable American cultural studies journal”, featured an article entitled “Transgressing […]

Corporate speak is of course tribal. So, to belong, you have to speak the tribal idiom. I have just finished […]

With some exceptions, there is no such a thing as single, global, monolithic corporate culture. There is usually a confederation […]

Wow! A woman at the helm! I still remember, vaguely, the first time I heard in one of my multiple […]

Busyness could be a cancer. It has nothing to do with business even if it’s just one letter different. Busyness […]

Meeting expectation, exceeding expectations and all that jazz! It’s often said that success equals performance minus expectations. Three comments on […]

I must confess I have always been, I suspect one of the very few, uncomfortable with the distinction leader-manager. It […]

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

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’. This is how John Brockman, founder of The Edge, and editor of a […]

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

Same experience in two different trips with two different airlines. The cabin crew at some point launches a fundraising plea […]

These are my 20 Rules of Leadership. After extensive research… Oh, no, wait a minute. It is true field research. […]

I am picking on Harvard because John Kotter is prof Emeritus there and he has been the master of the […]

A man is walking alongside the road with a bag of rice and throwing rice outside the road. Another man […]

Congratulations to The New York Times for their headline announcing the new editor of The Guardian newspaper (UK/US/Global). We are […]

Politicians will lie, their messages will be spin, they can’t be trusted. Many are corrupt. Companies with progressive social initiatives […]

This is number 2 in the list of Idea-Logic systems (ideologies) I have started to share yesterday (The Idea-Logic (ideology) […]

Companies, as large or not so large social groupings, have an ideology ( a logic of ideas). It may not […]

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

A McKinsey article on Finance (2015) quotes: As a result of their focus on short-term EPS, major companies often pass […]

I am of course paraphrasing Mario Cuomo’s ‘You campaign in poetry; you govern in prose’. Cuomo (1932-2015) was an American […]

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

I broke my antisocial tradition in taxi rides and started a conversation with my Panama driver. I asked him who […]

We have been exploring briefly in the last days the Steering system of the company under the formula: (1) Space […]

The trouble with value systems is that, very often, they have no proper translation into pragmatic and visible expectations that […]

The previous Daily Thoughts introduced the formula: (1) Space in the World (Purpose) + (2) Core Beliefs + (3) Non […]

Many companies operate under some sort of ‘Mission and Vision’ framework, often also accompanied, or preceded, by a statement of […]

The late Stanislav Andreski (1919-2007) British Professor of Social Sciences, in one of his vintage passages in ‘Social Sciences as […]

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

Is working from home ‘a matter of trust’? The Guardian supplement on ‘Top Employers Uk’ (28 February 2015) says so. […]

The company culture is its operating system. As such, we need to take care of it, keep it healthy, clean […]

Lawrence Freedman has written a massive work on Strategy. Freedman is professor of War Studies at King’s College (London) and […]

Culture is a double-edge sword. On one hand, it can host the most beautiful and sophisticate developments, enhance people’s life, […]

I remember the time when I was working in Pharmaceuticals (how sad is to start a sentence with ‘I remember […]

Today, exactly one year ago, I started the Daily Thoughts. Published every day at 08:00 am GMT in my personal […]

This is one of the many pearls of wisdom from Confucius.  Your revenge may kill the adversary but a bit […]

When Uber, the ride-on-demand business growing across the world, had a problem, didn’t call management consultants, but a political campaigner/social […]

That was Nietzsche on change management! It goes to the core of the issue of how we all try to […]

The hour has come. Radical is the word. From the Latin, radix, it means root. We need to get to […]

If any of these are a good picture of your organization, you need to put ‘critical thinking’ in the water […]

Over the years, I have learnt not to trust any expert who starts a paragraph with ‘Research shows that…’ It […]

Let me elevate the question of ‘differentiation’ to a higher level. Product differentiation? Sure. How different is different, that is […]

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

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

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

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

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

This is my brand new, 10 questions, Employee Engagement/Satisfaction/Climate/All-in-One Survey, or TCP 10. That’s right, this is ‘The Chalfont Project […]

There are two opposite and wrong reactions to Employee (engagement/satisfaction) surveys. In one end, there is the ‘ignore the findings’. […]

Medium and big organizations tend to use a competence system that segments people by grades and by degree of competence. […]

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

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

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

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

Did you hear me? Yes you did, but you are reading it. It’s an old trick. We have said this […]

In yesterday’s Daily Thoughts, I shared a Cheat Sheet with 10 points on how to create a social movement. I […]

Mobilizing people. This is another of the Holy Grails (how many have I said we have?) in management. Whether you […]

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

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

If my IT people did not have Google handy, and the ability to ‘ask the forum’, I would not have […]

1: The ‘annual’ measurement is artificial. It works for budgets and accountants but not for much more. If a project […]

Alternative title: A plan longer than six months to see initial success , is not worth the money. I suppose […]

Whilst the British Army creates its 77th Brigade of digital warriors, many corporations still think of social media as a […]

To think out of the box, one has to recognise first that there is a box. Therefore one has to […]

There are plenty of studies trying to figure out the differences between digital reading and reading a (physical ) book, […]

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

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

I am following up on the themes of the last days and, in particular, yesterday’s Thought The organization? It may […]

In any evolution of an organization from small to big, the list of challenges is never short.  I have written […]

The 3.45 pm syndrome goes as follows. You have a long day meeting. All is going well. It started early, […]

Small, sometimes entrepreneurial companies (small and entrepreneurial are not the same) enjoy ways of working that are fit for their […]

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

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

Think of your company processes and systems as its operating system, the equivalent of your human Windows 7, or 8, […]

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

The difference between the critical thinker and the un-critical one is not a difference in IQ, or mental strength, or […]

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

The Communications function in organizations has still today one of the best chances to drive strategic change. To do this, […]

When people form the US Republican side wanted to dismiss the importance of a ‘less-well-known’ Obama coming to the fry, […]

Back in 1994, Jim Collins, consultant an author, gained a lot of attention with his book Built To Last: Successful […]

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

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

Previously in 10 Ways to slow poisoning an organization: Script 1: I just know. Subtitle: I just know that we’ll […]

Previously in ’10 Ways to slow poisoning an organization’: Script 1: I just know. Subtitle: I just know that we’ll […]

Previously in ’10 ways to slow poisoning an organization’: Script 1: I just know. Subtitle: I just know that we’ll […]

  This is in part a self-test. I wrote an article on this in 2003, that is 11 years ago […]

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

Is Linked In a Digital Rolodex? A digital Resume/CV Library? Do you connect with people who have already given you […]

The pursue of happiness as a business goal and/or cultural goal, encounters all spectrum of emotions. For some, a naïve […]

Performance appraisal or performance management are one thing. Force Ranking into an artificial normal distribution of people in the organization, […]

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

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

This is Elizabeth Warren, American Senator, ex Harvard professor, who is ‘not running for President’ (as most future runners say), […]

‘The un-examined life’, a philosophical, Socratic concept that I have referred to before, is a good prompt for the end-of-year […]

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

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

There are 245 ‘Daily Thoughts’ in the collection. In my new book HOWEVER, which I will be pre-launching soon, they […]

Time out! I am pausing the Daily Thoughts until the New Year. Time to reflect and regroup. Since March, I […]

The Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is one of automatic movements and rituals. Patients have to repeat sequences of events, typically […]

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

The new, emerging organizations, many people would agree, are more collaborative, more leadership-distributed, less top-down, with more levels of empowerment […]

These two statements represent a form of magical thinking of the kind seen in ancient humans (clouds) and todays humans […]

A few months ago, I was in the lobby of a global pharma company waiting for my appointment. I sat […]

In the book by Gary Hamel and C.K Prahalad, ‘Competing for the Future’, the authors launched what since then I […]

The degree of comfort in discovering the roots of things, cannot be taken as proof of the truth. The best […]

My work as organization architect entails exploring avenues, not the offloading of  a dictionary of templates onto my clients. With […]

There is something only you can live: your own life. Socrates said that ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’. […]

Don’t define leadership for me. Tell me what legacy you want to leave behind, and I’ll know. What am I […]

Memo to all functions and Business Partners (HR, OD, L&D, Internal/Corporate Communications, Strategy Units, Finance, Health and Safety, Branding/PR, and […]

The space of your Self is occupied. By you. This is good news and bad news. On one hand, you […]

Many people, and certainly many of my clients, would like to have, or not to lose, ‘the entrepreneurial spirit’. Some […]

An insightful report from the Deloitte Human Capital services entitled ‘Rethinking Talent Management’ (December 2014), reminds us that ‘workforces’ are […]

Organizations have traditionally used a three-legged approach to creating a  ‘culture’: Communications, training and compliance. None of those in isolation […]

At the end of the summer, I had to stay for a very short period in a hospital, that is […]

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

Here are three baskets full of concepts: Basket one: Working conditions, Flexibility at work, Pay and perks, Reward and recognition, […]

Whether you are an external consultant, or a manager within an organization, you have a four step ladder as a […]

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

A while ago, I was told an anecdote about an MBA student who returned to his alma mater for a […]

If you had to build an organization from scratch, or re-design one, you would have options about some models to […]

The organization is a social network. Social networks are conduits of  information. There is no doubt that information goes up […]

If you go to the Orkut page within Google, you get this note: ‘Orkut was officially shut down on September […]

This phrase is attributed to the physicist Wolfgang Pauli, the same who described some arguments or theories as so bad […]

In Latin ‘Post hoc ergo propter hoc’. Free translation: B follows A, so A must be the cause of B. […]

Philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) requested before his death that the collection of his writings be called ‘Paths, not works’. He […]

‘First simplify, then exaggerate’ is a norm attributed to the praxis of Journalism. It has the merit of condensing clearly […]

Business loves inspirational stories. The world of entrepreneurship and leadership constantly draw on stories. Many people love sports analogies. Some […]

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

In organizational life we are used to the dichotomy ‘top-down’ and ‘bottom up’, for example, when we talk about change. […]

It seems like the Weekly News about Banks Bad Behaviour. This time about  big fines. ‘Between fines and legal costs, […]

A recent article in the New York Times refers to a Conference/initiative in San Francisco where the agenda is built […]

I don’t know where this quote comes from, but I have always seen it as a source of reflection on […]

Management Theory (if there is one) and management practice are not physics. We don’t have very solid data about what […]

In most organizations there is a certain dose of ambiguity: accountabilities not completely clear, some overlapping of responsibilities, dynamic tensions […]

There is evidence, intelligently articulated by Phil Rosenzweig in 2007 (The Halo Effect), that a series of measures of employee […]