List

Performance

  • Entering as a question mark, leaving as a period

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

  • Measurement: the Dogma. Here are 10 critical thinking principles.

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

  • Stickiness: the highest, inconvenient management challenge.

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

  • The cost of doing something versus the cost of not doing it. The second half is often missing.

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

  • The organization’s collective self-belief is often hidden. Leaders need to hear the unsaid.

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

  • Always explain the trade off. There is always one, and people can always understand it

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

  • Will ‘Enterprise Social Networks’ fail in the same way as ‘Knowledge Management’ did? It’s behaviours, stupid.

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

  • Some companies are run as a Permanent Focus Group

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

  • Some restructuring does not seem part of the solution. Bigger problems continue to appear. And the Fire Brigade has now a permanent sit in the Boardroom.

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

  • The problem is that all we say is that ‘the problem is’. There is no ‘and’.

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

  • ‘Memorable’ is beautiful. ‘Exceeding expectations’ is sad, tired, and as charismatic as a dead fish

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

  • The slack advantage: ‘The minute the future becomes unpredictable, efficiency can become your enemy’.

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

  • Managing by ‘the short term numbers’: what I learnt many years ago from a screen on the wall

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

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

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

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

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

  • HR competence systems need two things: a diet, and a dose of honesty

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

  • 10 reasons why you should scrap annual performance appraisals. Pick one.

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

  • Slow, tired, unexpected crashes, not enough memory, poor battery: I mean your company, not your laptop. You need an upgrade.

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

  • ‘It looks like a Bell Curve. It must be a HR Performance Appraisal’. Not in this Century. Normal distributions are dead

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

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      Daily Thoughts

    September 27th, 2023

    Redefining Talent Wealth

    The war on talent McKinsey consultants started it with a book of the same title. By focusing on what it […]
    September 8th, 2023

    What I Learnt From The Monks: A Little Anthropology Of Leadership And Space On One Page

    My friends, monks of a Benedictine monastery in the Highlands, Scotland, spend most of the time in silence. I mean, […]
    August 23rd, 2023

    Can We Rescue DEI From Its Trap (The Label)?

    Most of the problems and challenges in organizations, together with most of the solutions, are behavioural in nature. It’s about […]
    August 10th, 2023

    Restructuring to force collaboration, is likely to create more anxiety than collaboration. Structural solutions for behavioural problems hardly work.

    Sometimes restructuring is done with the intention of solving a collaboration problem. ´A people´ don’t talk to ´B people´; if […]
    July 18th, 2023

    The ‘Impossible To Disagree With’ School Of Management

    ‘Good leaders have empathy, respect employees and set the example. If you want to change things, you need to have […]
    June 29th, 2023

    Large scale change is not small scale change repeated many times. Small wins repeated are lots of small wins.

    Large scale change, as a series of cascading small scale interventions (often under the philosophy of ‘small wins’) has dominated […]
    June 6th, 2023

    Culture change is not long and difficult. But we make it so…

    I suppose the question is how long is long and how difficult is difficult? In general, business and organizational consulting have […]
    May 19th, 2023

    Value is an overused term in business and, as such, it’s becoming meaningless

    Value, as usually used, means transactional monetary value. Usually it doesn’t mean intrinsic value, or value per se. For example, […]
    May 4th, 2023

    The importance of ‘critical thinking.’ Your own critical thinking is more effective at making your workplace better than any generic employee survey.

    Build your own Employee Engagement argument for free. You can’t go wrong. Here are three baskets full of concepts: Basket […]
    April 21st, 2023

    ´Busy-Ness’ Is A Trap

    I went to a big conference where I was introduced by the chairman like this: “Welcome everybody. Lovely to have […]
    April 14th, 2023

    Training and culture change. The love affair that ends in tears.

    It seems to be very hard for people to get away from the idea that if we just put individuals […]
    April 11th, 2023

    Teamocracies and Networkracies have different citizens: in-Habitants in team-work, riders in net-work

    The old view of the organization is something close to the old concept of a medieval city, where citizenship was […]
    April 5th, 2023

    3 Ways To Get Approval From Your CEO Or Your Leadership Team

    Way number 1: My team has developed these three options, A, B and C. Which one do you want us […]
    March 29th, 2023

    A Cheat Sheet To Create A Social Movement Tip = to shape organizational culture since both are the same.

    Mobilizing people. This is another of the Holy Grails (how many have I said we have?) in management. Whether you […]
    March 16th, 2023

    Critical Thinking Self-Test: A 10 Point Health Check For Your Organization And Yourself. If any of these are a good picture of your organization, you need to put ‘critical thinking’ in the water supply.

    Test yourself, and your organization. Do any of these apply? Doing lots, too fast without thinking. High adrenaline, not sure […]
    March 9th, 2023

    A culture of safety or a culture of training in safety?

    Cultures are created by behaviours becoming the norm. Safety is at the core of many industries. Significant budgets are allocated […]
    March 2nd, 2023

    Empowerment is an output. If you can visualize it, you can craft it.

    The real question is, what do you want to see happening so that you can say ‘people are empowered’? Employee […]
    February 24th, 2023

    A simple question will jumpstart your organization into change. It will also save you from months of pain spent reorganizing your people and teams.

    The following line will short-cut months of (building) ‘alignment’, integration, reorganization, team building, coalition building, and any situation in which Peter, […]
    February 20th, 2023

    Lead Via Peer-To-Peer Networks – If you don’t lead via peer-to-peer networks, you’re only driving your car in first gear.

    Peer-to-peer work, transversal, spontaneous or not, collaboration, peer-to-peer influence, peer-to-peer activities of Viral Change™ champions or activists, all of this is the […]
    February 7th, 2023

    Write a script, not a strategic plan

    If you care about the journey and the place, you need a story. If you have a good, compelling one, […]
    January 26th, 2023

    3 self-sabotaging mechanisms in organizations

    Organizations, like organisms, have embedded mechanisms of survival, of growth and also of self-sabotage. These are 3 self-sabotage systems to […]
    January 10th, 2023

    Who should be involved in culture change? All inclusive versus going where the energy is.

    Many times, in my consulting work, I find myself facing a dilemma: Do I involve many people on the client’s […]
    December 23rd, 2022

    Tell what won’t change – Introducing 1 of my 40 rules of change

    In any change programme that any organization wants to start, they will start by thinking of the things that they […]
    December 16th, 2022

    Scale It – Introducing 1 of my 40 rules of change

    When creating effective change in any organization, there are 40 rules that, in my experience, are the key between success […]
    December 5th, 2022

    Assets & Strengths Base – Introducing 1 of my 40 rules of change

    For more than 30 years I have been involved in ‘change’ in organizations. Again and again, some fundamental principles, and often […]
    November 25th, 2022

    Campaign It… is 1 of my 40 rules of change

    When you filter out the noise, when you try to extract the core, the fundamentals, those ‘universal rules’ of change […]
    October 31st, 2022

    Hybrid or not hybrid? That’s not the question…

    Culture is the new workplace If you want to have a conversation about the future of work, the nature of […]
    October 24th, 2022

    ‘Powered by Viral Change™’: A Social Transformation Platform for the organization of the 21st Century

    When we started to work on Viral Change™, as a way to create large scale behavioural and cultural change, and […]
    October 14th, 2022

    Corporate tribes, intellectual ghettos and open window policies

    We talk a lot about silos in organizations usually in the context of Business Units or divisions. But these are not […]
    October 7th, 2022

    Peer Networks are the strongest force of action inside the organization

    Peer-to-peer works, transversal, spontaneous or not, collaboration, peer-to-peer influence, peer-to-peer activities of Viral Change™ champions or activists, all of this is […]