Extracts taken from my new book The Flipping Point. A flipping point in the trend for adopting absurd management ideas […]

A while ago, a telecom client complained to me about his particular division which seemed to work entirely ‘on relationships’. […]

Extracts taken from my new book ‘The Flipping Point‘. A flipping point in the trend for adopting absurd management ideas needs […]

Extracts taken from my new book ‘The Flipping Point‘. A flipping point in the trend for adopting absurd management ideas needs […]

Our concept of organizational culture as a receptacle for values, beliefs, attitudes, mindsets, ways of doing, written rules, unwritten rules, […]

Extracts taken from my new book ‘The Flipping Point‘. A flipping point in the trend for adopting absurd management ideas needs […]

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

Extracts taken from my new book ‘The Flipping Point‘. A flipping point in the trend for adopting absurd management ideas needs […]

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

Extract taken from my new book ‘The Flipping Point‘. A flipping point in the trend for adopting absurd management ideas […]

Extract taken from my new book ‘The Flipping Point‘. A flipping point in the trend for adopting absurd management ideas […]

Extracts taken from my new book ‘The Flipping Point‘. A flipping point in the trend for adopting absurd management ideas needs […]

Extracts taken from my new book ‘The Flipping Point‘. A flipping point in the trend for adopting absurd management ideas needs […]

Extracts taken from my new book ‘The Flipping Point‘. A flipping point in the trend for adopting absurd management ideas needs […]

Extracts taken from my new book ‘The Flipping Point‘. A flipping point in the trend for adopting absurd management ideas needs […]

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

An interview with Adam Pisoni, American entrepreneur and previously, co-founder of CTO and Yammer, brings back to my table the […]

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

This is the famous quote by Rahm Emanuel, who was mayor of Chicago from 2011 to 2019, and before that […]

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

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

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

[1] When on the road going back to normal, with catching up in mind, as if trying to find the […]

I miss the sight of the very important people, the super-men and super-women of the British Airways business lounge in […]

I don’t know about you, but I have used the expression ‘in the grand scheme of things’ many times in […]

Nassim Taleb has written about ‘antifragile’ as the quality of ‘growing from disorder’. He says that the opposite to fragile […]

Spot the difference at the dinner party or barbeque. So, what do you do Joe? [You must start with ‘so’ […]

Consistently attributed to physicist Wolfgang Pauli, who had no time for sloppy thinking, ‘not even wrong’ has become a category […]

If you work in a corporation with headquarters and affiliates, scattered in many places, or with international sites, you will […]

Interrogated by a journalist: ‘Mr Gandhi, what do you think of Western civilization?’, Mr Gandhi answered:  ‘I think that it […]

Many organizations seem to run layers of parallel initiatives, all directed at noble goals, and in many cases, without talking […]

The traditional thinking about divisional and functional structures within organizations, which were born of the need for specialization and a […]

Cost cutting, cutting to the bone, cutting resources down to the bare minimum is praised as efficient. But it’s not. […]

I am your customer, you are my customer. When I need to provide you with something, you are my customer. […]

A while ago, my brand new iPhone was stolen at the airport, having left it behind on a table for […]

“Where there is no vision, the people perish”, says the Book of Proverbs in the Bible. This quote comes in […]

Way number 1: My team has come up with these three options, A, B and C. Which one do you […]

Readers of my books and clients will be aware that I am not very fond of 360 degree feedback used […]

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

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

Some people have a hero within. They have this tremendous ability to mobilise energy, jump in when big issues present, […]

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

Discovering’ an old article that I wrote years ago, when I used to have a management column in a monthly […]

With the best of intentions, to call an organization a Democracy is an abuse of the term, unless of course, […]

Vocation is often defined as ‘a strong feeling’ to do something, a job, a career, an occupation, to dedicate one’s […]

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

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

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

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

‘Science advances by a series of funerals’. This is how John Brockman, founder of The Edge, and editor of a […]

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

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

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 […]

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

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

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

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

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

This is an anthropology report. We’ve found this tribe: the people all wear the same multi-coloured clothes. They paint their […]

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

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

Friends, my heart is broken today. The UK is leaving the European Union tonight at 11:00 pm continental time. Many […]

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

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

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

There are times when you get stuck in arguments.  Discussions seem to go nowhere. You are running in circles and […]

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

The traditional organization is, amongst other things, obsessed with closure.  It despises ambiguity and puts a premium on the absolute […]

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

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

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

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

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

One aspect of my work with organizations that I truly enjoy is to help craft the ‘Behavioural DNA’ that shapes […]

A meeting room without a flipchart is decaffeinated coffee. The absence of a flipchart insinuates possibly lots of talking, perhaps […]

Surprise is a powerful strategy in its own right. Surprise means being ahead of the game, being further ahead than […]

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

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

You have bought a pair of very expensive tickets for a classical music concert but the traffic is horrible and […]

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

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

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

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

Continuing with thoughts on critical thinking…. ‘Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end; then […]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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’ into the water […]

Many years ago, I got into Decision Analysis at the hands of my good friend Larry Philips of the London […]

Many years ago, I learnt from the UNHCR, the UN refugee Agency based in Denmark, that many global NGOs of […]

Management cultures, particularly Anglo Saxon, love acronyms. This is something new employees need to learn. If coming from another industry, […]

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

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

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

Nuccio Ordine, an Italian professor, has written an essay of this title, to my knowledge not translated into English. It […]

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

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

These are the 10 strategic options you have at your disposal all the time, as I use them with my […]

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

It should not surprise us that people are constantly looking for the magic bullet of leadership. What makes a good […]

“The history of mankind might be described by a cynic as a series of splendid expeditions towards the wrong goal […]

This quote is from an unknown author. He or she must have known a thing or two about the futility […]

I call Collective Leadership that state in the evolution of management teams or leadership teams when the power of the […]

As Mark Twain said himself, ‘The death of the charismatic leader has been grossly exaggerated’. The problem is that ‘charisma’ […]

Today, there are more similarities between a teenager in Shanghai and a teenager in Rome, or Singapore and Madrid, or […]

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

Many times in my consulting work, I find myself facing this dilemma. Do I involve many people on the client’s […]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is a period in child development when children start asking the question ’why?’. They usually seem unsatisfied with one […]

Clicktivism is the term used to describe the type of pseudo-activism that consists in clicking the ‘Like’ button (Facebook mainly) […]

Back in June 2016, people could walk over floating piers on Lake Iseo (Italy), all covered with yellow material, one […]

If you have a behaviour/value system and you want to recruit people in a way that this value system is […]

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

New units: Certificate of existence = 280 characters (Twitter) Presentation of ideas, maximum attention span = 18 mins (TED) Digital […]

One of the very frequent questions that I ask my clients is what they can stop doing so that they […]

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

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

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

Some organizations are little versions of Dante’s Inferno with its sign ‘Abandon hope all ye who enter here’ at the […]

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

Consistently over the years, the Edelman’s Trust Barometer has told us that the greatest source of trust inside the organization […]

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

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

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

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

Change management, or management of change. Thank God there can only be two permutations, because they are the most over-used […]

Said Wittgenstein. Language in business and organizations creates frames, but also limitations. And we have lots of these frames. ‘Employee […]

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

(1) If the top leadership of the company doesn’t exhibit the values/behaviours that you want to instill in the culture, […]

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

The historical existence of several layers of management in any organization may be related to its size. In a command […]

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

There is an ‘Accidental Literature for Leaders’.  I call this my compilation of poems or pieces of narrative that are […]

Try my Border Diet: A diet to protect yourself against persistent Full Disclosure that the digital world forces upon you. […]

Moses’ leadership was bad. He promised his people a land of milk and honey. Instead, they got a terrible hike […]

Many people, many of them in high managerial positions, succeed by avoiding failure. They become unmemorable by design. A new […]

One of the biggest compliments I’ve received in my consulting life, and one that I have come to appreciate more […]

It’s called the Shirky principle, after Clay Shirky, prolific American author of bestsellers such as ‘Here comes everybody’(2008)  and ‘Cognitive […]

The war on talent. McKinsey consultants started it with a book of the same title. By focusing on what seemed […]

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

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

There was this big conference that was introduced by the chairman in this way: ‘Welcome everybody. Lovely to have you […]

A few years ago, the BBC broadcast a series called ‘How we built Britain’, presented by the veteran David Dimbleby. […]

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

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

A neighbourhood with broken windows and graffiti on the walls says: look how easy it is to break a window […]

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

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

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

Here we go. I’m sounding a little gloomy for a Monday morning. I don’t mean to. Promise. Back in 2016 […]

It is unrealistic to expect upside down disruptive innovation in any business. But the absence of disruptive thinking may be […]

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

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

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

Henry Ford said, “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” ‘Faster horses strategies’ […]

Leadership has traditional sources of learning, reflection, role modelling and a ‘body of knowledge’. There are four that dominate. This […]

It’s impossible to listen in a noisy room.  If you want to listen to your breathing, you need silence. You […]

Emotional Intelligence was a paragraph-length concept expressed in a library of publications. At the time it was a shock in […]

William Stafford’s (1914 – 1993) poem reads: The things you do not have to say make you rich, Saying the […]

‘A year from now, you are all here standing in front of the CEO and you say: we screwed up! […]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I said yesterday that for large scale mobilization of people (AKA social movements, AKA company culture), it needs a platform. […]

I wish I could remember where I did read these stats.  Russia under the Tsar 1914-1917…had 180 million peasants and […]

In the era of digital semi anonymity, personal contact wins. In the era of corporate email broadcasting, personal contact wins. […]

Whether in society or inside the organization, we have plenty of ‘theories of change’ surprisingly unchallenged. Can we please look […]

Over the years, I have had lots of conversations about ‘corporate culture’ and in particular  ‘what to measure’. I must […]

Grandiose plans get sabotaged by small things. Many years ago, I was involved in what was going to be a […]

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 […]

Many clients have expressed this thought over the years: ‘Leandro, we are so good at crisis!’ And indeed they were!  […]

I owe this to Nassim Taleb (‘Fooled by Randomness’ (2007), ‘The Black Swan’ (2008), ‘Antifragile’ (2013). As a traveller of many years […]

In my experience, people can understand budget cuts, but there are several types of acceptance, leading to several levels of […]

I can’t remember where I saw this. This is part of the point. It could have been anywhere. But I […]

A recent senior hire in a client company commented to me that the thing that most impressed her in the […]

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

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

Robin Dunbar, an anthropologist and psychologist, Oxford professor, has formulated that 150 was the “cognitive limit to the number of […]

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

There must be a better way than having 200 consultants landing in my company and doing the stuff for me, […]

I have explored this theme before in my Daily Thoughts, but I feel compelled to go back! Behavioural issues, whether […]

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

Whilst the holidays roll on, here is a leadership theme to consider Picture this organization.  Closed culture, culture of secrecy, […]

Good Morning! The following article extends on our recent series on leadership this week. In the book by Gary Hamel […]

Good Morning!  Here is the last of our series of three on Leadership this week. Recently, I keep finding myself […]

‘Lack of communication’ or  ‘a communication problem’, is perhaps number one declared culprit in most of our troubled organizational life. […]

Morning to you.  Here is my second post in a series of three on Leadership: Don’t define leadership for me. […]

We praise people because of their ‘clarity of mind’. We say, ‘she is a good manager, she knows what she […]

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.  These very simple laws apply to any large scale change […]

Our faith in communication is enormous. Why? Perhaps because we know well the problems associated with the lack of communication. […]

Years ago I was talking to a client, a Senior VP in the company, about a project that had to […]

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

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

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 […]

Serious behavioural change? Start with micro-behaviours, then walk backwards to values, never the other way around. And bring peer-to-peer or […]

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

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

Any organization has accountability holes, areas where nobody really owns the space. Sometimes these are true ‘grey areas’, sometimes are […]

Perhaps the  best we can do for the next generations is to understand their dreams. They are not the same […]

We need teaming up, but we may not need more teams. We need role-modelling but may not need to call […]

Let’s revisit re-framing techniques. I covered this in a previous Daily Thought but still relevant today. Take  a look at […]

It’s 2019 – I wanted to revisit this from 2018 – are corporations developing, evolving, transforming, adapting….? And old sticker […]

A simple exercise that leaders can do, either on their own with paper and pen, or with their management team, […]

A ‘Daily Thought’ taken from one of my Leadership series’. Gold leadership, is the one above silver and bronze, that’s […]

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

Something for the weekend. Written back in 2017 but still rings true today! We naturally retreat to comfort zones. If […]

Another important idea (first published in 2016) worth revisiting. Enjoy! You can’t inject happiness in the organization. You can’t put […]

A previously posted Daily Thought – well-worth revisiting. John Le Carre, British ex secret intelligence serviceman, espionage writer, dixit. He […]

The formidable Rory Sutherland, vice chairman of Ogilvy (who declares that has ‘an attractively vague job title which has allowed […]

On one side, taxes are good, big government, social welfare, fighting for social justice and social mobility, human rights, women […]

Standard Operating Procedures, strategy documents, all normal process and systems and the organization chart are the headlines. If you really […]

It is counterintuitive to managers but not to cognitive scientists. Given airtime to an issue is not always a good […]

A few days ago, I went to a conference. It’s unusual for me these days because I have close to […]

The Good Mechanics of Continuous Improvement have given us a culture of feed-back. Feed back is worshiped. There is a […]

Sorry for the medicalization, an annoying legacy in my brain from many years of diagnosing and prescribing. Unlike many other […]

It’s terrifying. You are in front of an inquisitorial crowd, maybe your own people, and have to say, I don’t […]

I don’t know anything about boilers. Only that they are prone to take sabbaticals and stop delivering. In many cases […]

I published this ages ago. Some people have asked me to repeat… since the robots are still coming and apparently […]

I have been researching for a while the not-that-easy topic of ‘cognitive mental frames’ or ‘mental models’ that take over […]

We can measure anything. Vital things, rubbish things, relevant, secondary, soft, hard, anything. We have been told by the Wise […]

What is authenticity? For starters, a very nice word. One of these that we love to attach as a command: […]

First published in September 2018. An American educator said that children entered school as a question mark and left school […]

First published in August 2018. We are used to look at the cost of doing things. And rightly so. We […]

First posted back in January. Most of our organizational problems are behavioural. Structural answers hardly solve behavioural problems. Amalgamating A […]

First published in November 2018 If one thing has become clear after all these decades of management soul-searching for more […]

Socrates said. Or Plato said Socrates said. Socrates never wrote a word. He did not trust them. They were the […]

This is a question always  tempting leaders to give an answer. Eager to show that people will benefit, we spend […]

My mind is not for change. Look how strong I am. In the Brexit context, the discussion has often been […]

Space to reflect? Where is that? Are you saying we are not reflective? Don’t we have an intelligence? Are you […]

I know leaders who are obsessed with this: the systematic use of feed back between managers and staff, between people. […]

We are pulled to conform to the group, to participate, to contribute, to say something. Nodding is not enough. Taking […]

In this model, the employee (1) is an activist, (2) largely working peer-to-peer, and (3) progressing towards (if not arriving […]

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

This is model 4 of the series.  The concept is simple. Imagine that you, as an employee, are in reality an […]

(the series on Employee Engagement will continue later) Organizational dynamics are full of ‘default thinking’. We assume that some things […]

This is model 3 (but the 4th post, confusing!)  ‘The Cause’. Employees join forces to work on a Cause: green agenda, corporate […]

This is model 2 in the pack of 6 that I have described. There is a book, or two, and its […]

Model 1 of my 6 is what I call, ‘Air time’. It translates into: ‘we recognise that employees’ views are not properly […]

Over the next 7 days, we wanted to revist a series of posts from 2017, exploring the important topic of […]

In yet another experiment by Nicholas Christakis team (see previous Daily Thought on mistakes by robots!) they tested the power […]

Being open about mistakes, own mistakes, team mistakes, has always being considered a driver for trust. If I as leader […]

First published October 2018 If you love KPIs, here is one. The attractiveness of your (corporate) function is defined by […]

First published back in 2016 Plato told us in his Symposium that humans were originally androgynous, not men or women. […]

First published in November 2017. This is the request we make at the beginning of a Viral Change™ programme. Forget […]

First published September 2018 Also called get out of the room and don’t interfere. Also asking the question ‘may I […]

First published back in November 2018. If one thing has become clear after all these decades of management soul-searching for […]

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

Every year I review the version of this list and share with my community. Here is again, 2019 mode, with […]

The unwritten rules of the organization tell you more about its culture than all powerpoionts of its leadership programmes. The […]

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

David Brooks, columnist of the New York Times and author (too conservative for the liberals and too liberal for the […]

Organizational life can go on, driven by management, without asking people about their motivations. These are assumed in a rather […]

Bottom-up is not more (of the same) workshops but at the bottom of the organization. Changing the geography of top-down […]

The ‘critical mass’ concept, as the number of people required to move forward, to change collective behaviours, to see a […]

The Free Rider problem is studied in social sciences and refers to people who benefit from a collective (mainly public) […]

Increasing the connectivity of people, who will benefit from enhanced collaboration ,to achieve good things better, faster, differently, is a […]

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

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

And employee characters, and company culture, and all the unwritten rules of the organization are shaped in the cafeteria, the […]

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

Given our growing impatience and limited attention span (our minds are overheated in the filtering of information, like traffic control […]

Possibility is perhaps the most beautiful word in management. There are organizations in which possibilities seem exhausted, work is an […]

Suddenly purpose is back. We are told that Millennials want purpose. Which may be true. As much as many other […]

Attention Chief Transformation Officers, Offices of Transformation, Change Management Units, and Change Offices, and Projects of Future A,B,C,. Units of […]

The full quote: ‘Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to […]

Yesterday, my wife and I said goodbye to a good friend from France who works as a high level executive […]

Wisdom Nomads go form meeting to meeting. ‘We need to make sure that’, ‘we have to know how this fits […]

Behavioural change is still presented in many quarters with the same language as installing a piece of software. Or maybe […]

Most of our organizational problems are behavioural Structural answers hardly solve behavioural problems. Amalgamating A and B because A and […]

I was used to the concept of catastrophic failure, but not catastrophic success, until I read an article in the […]

Hello from The Chalfont Project Daily Thoughts is in pause mode until the New Year. You can still browse and […]

Some organizations seem to have a love affair with problems. They love their disruptive and furtive nature.  Secret encounters in […]

I could  not sleep, it was almost unbearable. Then I woke up and  the weather was horrible. The traffic was […]

  Culture is the difference between 30 people making a decision in 30 days, and 3 people making the same […]

For as long as anybody can remember in management history, the team has been highlighted as the unquestionable form of […]

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

Reposting a favourite from back in April 2017. Enjoy! One of the most toxic practices in organizational life is equating […]

The author Doris Kearns Goodwin wrote a most interesting book  about the Lincoln presidency: ‘Team of Rivals’. It says it […]

If you want to learn from biographies of leaders, from their inspirations, about their traits, maybe tricks, read about Lincoln, […]

I owe this phrase to John Kerry whom I had the privilege of seeing on his London tour promoting his […]

I trust you because I can say ‘I haven’t got a clue’ and you don’t think I am an idiot […]

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

I am back to one of my favourites: measuring value. One of my oldest Daily Thoughts told this story. A […]

It’s a typical saying in US politics and I suspect in many other places. It’s a powerful thought. Every day […]

Allow yourself to be a bit inefficient Reinvent some wheels from time to time Don’t always reuse the same presentation […]

Deprogramming is a form of management detox. We navigate and work in organizations with a great deal of automatic pilot […]

The cult of Employee Satisfaction surveys is fading.  Companies are doing less or less frequent. Perhaps there is some tiredness. […]

If one thing has become clear after all these decades of management soul-searching for more or less universal truths, this […]

Says Barbara Webb, professor of Biorobotics, who tries to simulate living organisms behaviours and extrapolate form here. It sounds like […]

Your son’s teacher says: your son John does not hand in the homework on time, quality is poor, we don’t […]

I have seen the same slide yet again. It keeps following me on Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook. OK, not on […]

At a recent conference, one of the speakers explained his recent experience in a building materials, large shop where he […]

As with many modern clever quotes, there is more than one author claiming this. Symptoms of potentially ‘all fools in […]

Multinational companies are values and behaviours schools. It may not be in their mission and vision, in the job descriptions […]

Some organizations that are very good at (external) marketing, are terrible at internal. Grand market(ing) plans, but can’t sell a […]

If you love KPIs, here is one. The attractiveness of your (corporate) function is defined by the number of people […]

Two years  ago, starting in the Midwest of Ireland, a bottom up social movement, ‘Values in Action’, started to shape […]

This has become a mantra used by many leaders to express the desire that people take seriously their commitments ‘as […]

Some organizations are breathless. Frantic. It could be good or bad, usually not too good.  Other organizations are like funerary […]

Malaria is not an increase of temperature in the thermometer Employee engagement is not a score in a Gallup scale […]

For many non-American, non-Anglo-saxon organizations the idea of fun is ‘that American thing’. It’s a bit unfair and reductionistic. I […]

The recent launch of the “Mobilize!” Masterclass has led to much discussion about Social Movements here at Daily Thoughts HQ. […]

These rules apply whether you are an external partner or an internal one. Rule number 1. Resistance is never universal. […]

Do you understand the strategy? Yes Can you see why we need to change, to do anything? Yes Do you […]

Semi connected reflections: [1] We talk a lot, email a lot, reply a lot, post a lot, say ‘I agree […]

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

Airtime is finite. Initiatives, activities, tasks, ideas, attention to people, reaching the boss, innovation discussions, programmes, change programmes, leadership programmes, […]

In the previous  Daily Thoughts I suggested: Readiness is a red herring and usually an alibi for not starting something […]

A  client, senior manager, mentioned to me recently that his company spent a disproportionate amount of time ‘getting ready’. He […]

[1] January starts around the 10th of the month. February is shorter and boring. Unless you go skiing, which half […]

An American educator said that children entered school as a question mark and left school as a full stop. I […]

‘Smoking kills’, or ‘Don’t Drink and Drive’ or ‘Get the Flu Vaccine’ are wonderful attempts to warn your fellow citizens […]

Many years ago companies started to say ‘we are organized in project teams’. Professional projectization was the thing. Until it […]

This is an unwritten rule in US presidential elections and a line in a witty and fascinating book by Dan […]

From The Chalfont Project, UK office: Dear all. Dr Leandro Herrero has produced a 5 hour masterclass divided into 28 […]

Also called get out of the room and don’t interfere. Also asking the question ‘may I be, perhaps, actually, the […]

Our thinking is far from rational. What’s new? Perhaps ‘making a rational decision’ should be reframed as ‘making a decision […]

One of my favourite sets of Team Rules. Real life. Not invented. One of my best clients. Always curious No […]

A headline in a newspaper on the 9th of August 2018 red ‘Deutsche Bank Cuts Again. Not Even Fruit Bowls […]

‘To tell you the truth’ is an opening in English conversation. Other similar are ‘to be honest with you’, or […]

Co-benefit is a term broadly used in the Climate Change movement to explain the unintended/extended consequences of actions beyond an […]

Take  a look at these 5 re-frames. You should see the differences not just the simple literary ones but the […]

And old sticker said This is a situation in which I find myself very often: Several corporate groups agree (vocally, […]

A simple exercise that leaders can do, either on their own with paper and pen, or with their management team, […]

We need a revolution in business academia or it will become irrelevant. Apprenticeships  are already far greater value than academic […]

We are used to looking at the cost of doing things. And rightly so. We ask those questions as a […]

And those which are maybe less dangerous than those who aren’t. In an old 2005 study, which findings are very […]

‘Work conquers all’, or ‘steady work overcomes all things’ Virgil dixit. For many, the time of post-break is approaching, if […]

Welcome to the last in our summer recap series. We hope you have enjoyed re-reading some of our favourite posts […]

The second of this week’s recap posts on Social Movements. Enjoy! Tribes in the organization: seeing the world in segments, […]

Normal service will be resuming shortly at Daily Thoughts HQ! But first, we wanted to share some of the best […]

Here is the third of our favourite posts on Leadership. Enjoy and have a great weekend! The ‘research’ for the […]

Here is the 2nd of this week’s revisited posts focused on Leadership… Three magic questions for leaders 1. Will I […]

Welcome to the third in our series of summer “Recaps”, this week focusing on Leadership. We hope you enjoy our […]

Here is the third of our favourite posts on Culture. Enjoy and have a great weekend! Grab the magic thresholds […]

The second of this week’s posts on Culture. Enjoy! Lazy managers love questionnaires No offence to questionnaires. They are legitimate […]

As Daily Thoughts is taking a short summer hiatus, this week we are sending you a few of our favourite […]

Here is this week’s final recap post looking at the Viral Change™ Mobilizing Platform. Have a great weekend! Networks have […]

Here is this week’s second “recap” post on the Viral Change™ Mobilizing Platform. Enjoy!   Change management is dead. Let’s […]

Dear Readers, Daily Thoughts is taking a short holiday! But never fear, over the next few weeks we will be […]

Organizational transformation equals organizational life. Sometimes we add an adjective to signpost a direction. For example, digital transformation. Very often […]

In the old days of my parents, there was an unwritten consensus that your problems in life, your anxiety at […]

Given our growing impatience and limited attention span (our minds are overheated in the filtering of information, like traffic control […]

The answer to individual negativity is group positiveness.  Fighting individual negativity at individual level is a risky fight. If you […]

Increasing the connectivity of people, who will benefit from enhanced collaboration ,to achieve good things better, faster, differently, is a […]

(A similar version of this post was released out of sync with it;’s part 1. Apologies for those who got […]

A glitch in the system made the publication of part 2 of this out of sync and was sent last […]

Teamocracy may be the worst form of people collaboration  except for all those other forms that have been tried from […]

If you talk to my clients, they will tell you that I use cooking analogies all the time. Cook this, […]

Our managerial training and praxis has been quite successful at making us guilty of not focusing enough on a task […]

Give me a sequence, some boxes, a template on steps, lots of arrows and a PowerPoint, and I will create […]

Beloit College, in Wisconsin, creates every year a ‘Mindset List’ It shows a list of facts about a particular new […]

In October 2013, a ship carrying migrants sank off the Italian island of Lampedusa. 300 people drowned. As The Guardian journalist Kenan […]

1. Will I regret not doing this? Bezos, Amazon chief. Here it is from a recent article: ‘When faced with […]

Friday 25 May, 2018. Ireland votes 66.4% in favour of repealing the Eight Amendment of its Constitution, inserted in 1983, […]

Today we are in front of daily wars of narratives: political, social, models of the world, futures, concept of Man. […]

For the last, at least, 10 years of my consulting life, I have struggled to confirm the thesis, well publicised […]

Continuous culture shaping within an organization equals social movement: large scale behavioural and cultural change, for a purpose, powered by […]

‘I welcome criticism’ is often an alibi to avoid criticism. OK, that’s as harsh as it goes for a generic. […]

Accustomed as we are to create plans to succeed  on something, this may sound counterintuitive. Creating (serious) plans for failure […]

(1) We plan operations, change, leadership, anything, with intended consequences in mind. These are often translated into KPIs, milestones, and […]

For every community struggling to achieve something, and deciding to launch some form of collective action; for every minority that […]

George Lakoff, a familiar name in these Daily Thoughts, is on a mission. The US cognitive psychology specialist,  emeritus professor, […]

I good friend, expert in Communications, has created her new website with a prominent quote of mine, ‘Change Management as […]

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

In this miniseries I have shared so far four inconvenient truths uncovered by the forensics of ‘change management’ failure: Too […]

Forth in the mini series:  uncovering of truths of the failure of change and transformation programmes, via a reverse engineering. […]

Third installment in the uncovering of truths via a reverse engineering of the failure of change and transformation programmes. Finding: […]

Second installment in the uncovering of truths via a reverse engineering of the failure of change and transformation programmes. Many […]

This five part mini-series (!) is not glamourous. It tries to uncover some inconvenient truths via a reverse engineering of […]

Managing? Leading?  Probably one of the worse dichotomies ever invented. Another day. Engaging? Motivating? Committing? Consider Mobilizing! It means…what it […]

I have held the view for many years that management is ‘by invitation’ (Disruptive Ideas, 2008). For example, I am […]

The word Pontifex (Pontiff in English) is the term associated with the Pope (twitter account…err.. @pontifex, what else?). I love […]

I have referred before to  George Lakoff’s work and his little book ‘Don’t think of an elephant’, which makes the […]

F. Scott Fitzgerald is one of many who have described this, but his articulation is the one widely quoted: “The […]

The problem with super efficacy and super efficiency is that what works for a Swiss watch does not work for […]

Structural answers to organizational problems are very unlikely to succeed. Division A people don’t collaborate with Division B people, so […]

Would you join a Facebok with 100 users? A Yammer with few entries? A Twitter where only a few tweets? […]

Learning from mistakes, make mistakes, learn, it’s OK, mistakes are OK, we are human, if we did not make mistakes […]

Toxic people. A sample. The top 12 to watch: The bully who is not challenged The bully who is not […]

Yesterday was International Receptionist Day. Perhaps it was buried in a myriad of International Days of Something. But the receptionist […]

Read. Take a deep breath. Read again. Keep breathing, think about this. ‘The system will prevent itself from solving the […]

New organizations, and old ones in the business of transforming themselves, would be better off learning by heart these two […]

My third framing comment, after (1) framing new behaviours, and (2) the framing of the overall narrative of the organization, […]

I said yesterday that I would put framing at the top of the list on ‘leadership tasks’ I also said […]

I put framing at the top of the list on ‘leadership tasks’. One of those non-rocket-sciences around us that we […]

We never solve problems, we trade them off. The thought is not depressing. It is liberating because it means we […]

If I had a say in new roles for large organizations, I think I would establish this new Division: VP […]

If you follow my Daily Thoughts you would know that I despise Employee Engagement as something that you need to […]

When my daughter was in primary school, I was invited by the teacher to give a presentation to small girls […]

No medium to large size company has a single culture.  No medium to large size French, or British or American […]

Affinity, like-minded groupings and ‘we know each other very well’ works if what you want is to get things done, […]

Our concept of organizational culture as a receptacle for values, beliefs, attitudes, mindsets, ways of doing, written rules, unwritten rules, […]

An 18 year old paper in social anthropology by Marilyn Strathern (then at Cambridge) had the intriguing title of ‘The […]

Employee engagement is an outcome, not in input. You don’t inject engagement or engineer activities to engage. Those do exist. […]

I sometimes think that management thinking, management speak and management education (that includes ‘research’) makes everything possible to avoid critical […]

This is the last one in the series  of 10 Organizational Pathologies, and the longest write up. Sorry! Bear with […]

Attributed to Peter Drucker, we have inherited the ‘you can’t manage what you can’t measure’. Drucker meant that you need […]

Almost there, two to go. I have posted one pathology per day (see the website) Busy-ness! From all organizational pathologies […]

Over inclusiveness paralysis occurs as a side effect of good intentions. The intentions are usually democratic, egalitarian, based on respect […]

Processes are supposed to provide these three  things A sure and presumably tested path to address repetitive situations, so that […]

‘Postponing’ (AKA as procrastination) maybe healthy and reasonable, maybe not. Cultures are created by behaviours. The best predictors of behaviours […]

In medicine, autoimmune disease is one in which ‘the body produces antibodies that attack its own tissues, leading to the deterioration […]

Hierarchy is dead, proclaim people in the advanced, enlightened, guru-read organization. Hierarchy is bad, ugly, cause of all problems, constraining, […]

Communicate, communicate, communicate, we were told. All the problems go back to communication. This is your default culprit. In doubt, […]

Solutionism  is a common condition in which the energy and airtime of the organization is consumed in finding solutions to […]

I shared yesterday three types of employees I want for the modern organization. Different characters on the payroll. If there […]

My ideal modern organization has different characters on the payroll. If there is a payroll. These are three of them […]

Please pray for the soul of incrementalism that, after a long and slow incremental illness, left us for good. After […]

I have never found a client that says we don’t need evidence, or data, or facts, or hard measures. Most […]

I’ve learnt recently  a new Mckinsean acronym: MECE (Mutually Exclusive Collectively Exhaustive). Meaning, you break ‘it’ all down  in (Mutually […]

Ok, so you are back. I shared yesterday 5 shifts. Here are the other 5. As I said yesterday, Viral […]

  Ok, if you insist, here it is. Commercial or not, it’s also true. I need to share with you […]

Ryan Holiday (media critic, stoicism vendor, marketing strategist) is ‘the best-selling author of Trust Me, I’m Lying: Confessions of a […]

Have you seen those videos, or TV interviews, or programmes, in which there is a disconnect between what the person […]

I must say I am getting very frustrated to see more and more companies which  workforce seems to function as […]

When I was young, very young, many moons ago, I remember my school mates and the priests having discussions such […]

I read a while ago this story. Within the highly structured and hierarchical (by design) Catholic church, a Religious Order […]

Part 2 of 2 from yesterday’s ‘The (re)volution will be postponed. Once more’ Margaret Mead (anthropologist, 1901-1978) ‘Never doubt that a […]

The below is the equivalent of how in some organizations the so called ‘management of change’  or cultural transformation are […]

Did you fall in love after reading case studies and using benchmarking data?  Did you see the Mona Lisa in […]

Maybe, just maybe, we don’t  need ‘managers’ and ‘employees’, as in generals and troops. My strong bet is for a […]

Really? Recently I went to visit a specialist doctor in a private facility. Of course I was handed out a […]

For the record, you can measure anything, the relevant, the irrelevant, the crucial and the distractions. Measuring is not a […]

What if your unintended consequences were as big as the intended ones? This happens in our Viral Change™  programmes all […]

There was a time when ‘my tanks are bigger than yours’ was the so called competitive advantage. Bigger muscle, bigger […]

No offense to those with the title in the business card. No offense to the whole industry. You are well […]

When researching for my 2011 book Homo Imitans, I was interested in the human ability to copy from our environment. […]

And employee characters, and company culture, and all the unwritten rules of the organization are shaped in the cafeteria, the […]

When people join a company, coming from another one, they need to marry different worlds: The one of the company […]

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

No offense to questionnaires. These are legitimate tools to know what is going on! People may argue that in a […]

The ‘tyranny of knowledge’ is one of these phrases used in a diversity of contexts. It means amongst other things […]

There is a point in time in which the brain starts filtering the images coming in, all the lines written, […]

It’s been a while. Having a gap in the writing daily date helps to gain perspective. I went through a […]

Happy New Year! Daily Thoughts will be back in flow on the 1st of February During this gap, I have […]

It has been an intense year in many aspects. I am grateful to clients and friends, and above all my […]

This is a straight quote from Nassim Taleb (Fooled by Randomness, Black Swan, Antifragile) A private library is not an […]

Flat organizations, part of the Pancake Revolution (got the patent pending) that we have gone through, trimming management layers and […]

The phrase is from John Lennon who stole it from TS Elliott (‘amateur poets borrow; mature poets steal’). There are […]

Hardly a question I can answer with statistics, but I would tend to agree. This good article points in that […]

I must have heard this for the first time from Tom Peters many years ago. He was, and he is, […]

  Donald Winnicott (1896- 1971) was a brilliant British psychoanalyst. And you won’t find many instances of my praising psychoanalysis, […]

In the old days of medical school and psychiatric training we used to say that schizophrenia was a secret society […]

In preparation for Santa, I suggest we aim at a package of shifts in the organizational life: a 10 point […]

Some organizations want agility, entrepreneurship, great innovation and superb customer centrism. But they are operating with structures, processes and behaviours […]

The Visitor is a full time member of a project team. He arrives late, very late. Smiles a lot. Takes […]

So some organizations cook very, very large ones. No, this is not a gastronomic blog. Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s CEO, said […]

This is of course not something every mortal is privileged to do: to make ‘work’ an exciting, fulfilling and meaningful […]

I have recorded this for an HR and Communications conference that I could not attend. This is a good recent […]

There is a moment in the life of our kids in which they start questioning the story of Santa coming […]

Project management is a state of mind, not a software. But if you have both, it helps. Some people have […]

Whether in society or inside the organization, we have plenty of ‘theories of change’ surprisingly unchallenged. Can we please look […]

Happy Weekend Daily Thoughts Subscribers! Here is a compilation of 3 of some our latest posts – all with the […]

This piece of conventional wisdom is almost never true. That ‘they were ready’ is very often the a posterity rationalization. […]

I said yesterday that large scale mobilization of people (AKA social movements, AKA company culture) needs a platform. They don’t […]

I wish I could remember where I did read these stats.  Russia under the Tsar 1914-1917…had 180 million peasants and […]

In the last weeks, for a number of reasons, I have had lots of conversations about ‘corporate culture’ and in […]

Spreading the word and unleashing a movement Guest blogger: Kahlil Coyle. Social Movement Leader; Values in Action Core Team, Health […]

Welcome back Subscribers!   In case you are not aware, posting of Daily Thoughts resumed on Monday 6 November after […]

This is the request we made at the beginning of a Viral Change™ programme. Forget your function and your hierarchical […]

In the era of digital semi anonymity, personal contact wins. In the era of corporate email broadcasting, personal contact wins. […]

I did not say that. Natasha Jen did. She is a designer who has given some provocative presentations under this […]

For as long as anybody can remember in management history, the team has been highlighted as the unquestionable form of […]

A true story. A health care worker is truly struggling to do her work and caring for a son who […]

Dear Subscriber My team has been posting for a while, selected previously published Daily Thoughts.  Also retweeting some of them. […]

Grandiose plans get sabotaged by small things. Many years ago, I was involved in what was going to be a […]

In this model, the employee (1) is an activist, (2) largely working peer-to-peer, and (3) progressing towards (if not arriving […]

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

This is model 4 of the series.  The concept is simple. Imagine that you, as an employee, are in reality an […]

This is model 3 (but the 4th post, confusing!)  ‘The Cause’. Employees join forcers to work on a Cause: green agenda, corporate […]

Happy Weekend to all our readers Today we are taking another look at activism and grass roots communications.  We hope […]

This is model 2 in the pack of 6 that I have described. There is a book, or two, and it’s […]

Model 1 of my 6 is what I call, ‘Air time’. It translates into: ‘we recognise that employees’ views are not properly […]

A while ago I posted my views on Employee Engagement. Since this has become an industry in its own right, and […]

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 […]

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

If you are a frequent flight traveller, as I am for business reasons, you will be familiar with the standard […]

I owe this to Nassim Taleb (‘Fooled by Randomness’ (2007), ‘The Black Swan’ (2008), ‘Antifragile’ (2013). As a traveller of many years […]

Happy Weekend to all our Readers This week we have decided to take another look at some posts that focus […]

Henry Ford is quoted to have said ‘why is it every time I ask for a pair of hands, they […]

Many clients have expressed this thought over the years: ‘Leandro, we are so good at crisis!’ And indeed they were!  […]

Andrew Grove, ex Intel This business about speed has its limits. Brains don’s speed up.  The exchange of ideas does […]

Robert Anson Heinlein (1907-1988), American science fiction writer, was famous for his quotes. This is one.  Many uses and interpretations […]

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

In my experience, people can understand budget cuts, but there are several types of acceptance, leading to several levels of […]

Happy Weekend to all our Readers This week we have decided to take another look at some posts that encompass […]

Disclaimer: I don’t have shares in the company, or discounts, or commissions! No place I know can match Chateauform  (http://chateauform.com) […]

I can’t remember where I saw this. This is part of the point. It could have been anywhere. But I […]

A friend of mind, a great artist, posted his latest challenge in Facebook.  He had presented a product idea to his […]

Saint Francis of Assisi is a 13th Century figure revered as a Saint by the Catholic Church, and who founded […]

A recent senior hire in a client company commented to me that the thing that most impressed her in the […]

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

Happy Weekend to all our Readers This week we have decided to take another look at some posts that encompass […]

‘Lack of communication’ or  ‘a communication problem’, is perhaps number one declared culprit in most of our troubled organizational life. […]

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

Our faith in communication is enormous. Why? Perhaps because we know well the problems associated with the lack of communication. […]

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

Robin Dunbar, an anthropologist and psychologist, Oxford professor, has formulated that 150 was the “cognitive limit to the number of […]

With the holidays coming to a close and everyone returning to ‘work mode’, here is a recent post on employee […]

It’s 2017. Business as selfish, self-centered, a-social, ‘it’s-all-about-money-sorry’, is gone. So many people say. ‘Old fashioned views, we have moved […]

Happy Long Weekend to all our Readers This week we have decided to look at behaviour and culture, first with […]

There must be a better way than having 200 consultants landing in my company and doing the stuff for me, […]

Years ago I was talking to a client, a Senior VP in the company, about a project that had to […]

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

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

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

I have explored this theme before in my Daily Thoughts, but I feel compelled to go back! Behavioural issues, whether […]

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

Whilst the holidays roll on, here is a continuation of the leadership theme to consider before the summer is over  […]

A glitch in the system yesterday meant there was a duplication in the Daily Thoughts posts.  Please accept our apologies […]

Good Morning! The following article extends on our recent series on leadership this week, which we hope you enjoy In […]

Good Morning!  Here is the last of our series of three on Leadership this week. Recently, I keep finding myself […]

Morning to you.  Here is our second post in a series of three on Leadership: Don’t define leadership for me. […]

We are revisiting leadership this week.  This is one of a series of 3.   We praise people because of […]

Happy weekend!   To finish our week of recaps on Social Movement related posts, we have selected 3 more favourites […]

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

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

The second of this week’s revisited posts – this one was first published in June 2016 (check back tomorrow for part […]

As Dr Leandro Herrero is away, the Daily Thoughts will be taking a short “pause” this week. In the meantime, […]

Happy weekend to all our readers!   This week we decided to look back over some old posts around organizational inflection […]

Part 2 of 2, first published November 2015 Yesterday I offered 10 types of people that challenge the status quo […]

Part 1 of 2, First published in November 2015… Who challenges in organizations? People who have nothing to lose People […]

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

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

Apologies for the delay in Daily Thoughts posts this week, we have been having some technical issues! We are now […]

Serious behavioural change? Start with micro-behaviours, then walk backwards to values, never the other way around. And bring peer-to-peer or […]

Happy weekend to our readers!   Behavioural Change is pivotal to all of our work at The Chalfont Project and as […]

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

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

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

Any organization has accountability holes, areas where nobody really owns the space. Sometimes these are true ‘grey areas’, sometimes are […]

Happy weekend to all Daily Thoughts readers! Unbelievably we have have reached the end of another month, so it’s time […]

My experience of several health care delivery systems, both as a patient and as external consultant, is that they function […]

The third post in my “Leadership Recap” series… Gold leadership, is the one above silver and bronze, that is. Sorry […]

The second post in my “Leadership Recap” series… One of the key rules of activism (social, political, cause) is not […]

Over the next few days, I will be revisiting some of my favourite posts on Leadership. I hope you enjoy […]

Nassim Taleb’s piece in Medium about ten months ago entitled The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority is […]

I have described before the role of managers in many ways, often pointing to the risk of becoming ‘information traffic […]

Happy weekend to all Daily Thoughts Readers, and apologies for the lack of summary last week! This week we have […]

Steve Richards’  ‘The Rise of the Outsiders: How  Mainstream Politics Lost Its Way’ (2017), has prompted me to reflect on […]

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

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

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

Below is a popular post from last year which we thought was worth revisiting – enjoy! Audiences receive messages, whether […]

Admin note: We would like to apologize for the disruption in the past few days on the regular posts by Dr. […]

In previous Daily Thoughts  (here and here) I wrote about some simple maths of the organization when understood as a […]

It’s hard to write after yet another terrorist attack just a few miles from my keyboard, and not to make […]

Happy weekend everyone! This is the Daily Thoughts support team calling! As we start another month, we take this opportunity […]

Yesterday Daily Thoughts started some Organization Mathematics for dummies. [Training is to addition what culture change is to multiplication] Believe […]

So if you have a ‘culture change programme’ that is based on adding more and more people going through a […]

Yes, I’ve reached that quota. They are all in the website and, incidentally, they are screaming for a new home […]

English not being my mother tongue, I always take the liberty of using terms that polite English people don’t use […]

Vulnerability is a luxury. The world may attack you, take advantage of you. You should measure the love of people […]

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 works […]

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 […]

Peer-to-peer work, transversal, spontaneous or not, co-laboration, peer-to-peer influence, peer-to-peer activities of Viral Change™ champions or activists, all of this […]

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 weaknesses, 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 with 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 […]

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

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

“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 ‘elevator pitches’, of one page formulations, a clear summary, a 140 character message […]

Here you are. 25 identities for Project Leaders/Product Developers/Team leaders etc. Some you’ll like, some you won’t. Some you’ll think […]

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

I think the 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 […]

Beacon of moral values and having a secret affair? Anti poverty leader, managing a healthy Swiss bank account? Gender equality […]

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

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, a Jewish leader who died in 10 CE, is remembered outside the Jewish tradition […]

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 so long ago, we would have considered the employee having a sort of schizophrenic mind by force. Persona A […]

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 the ‘person of the year’ for the front cover of Time […]

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 had a discussion with a client recently, about the resistance to get rid of complicated processes that almost everybody […]

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, […]

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

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 excellent Homo Deus book to describe the narrow view that we have […]

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 not 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 from Monday’s Daily Thought on Employee Disengagement, in which I suggested four main sources: The video and the […]

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 into 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 […]