List

Talent, Skills, Human Capital

  • That great new hire, welcome with fanfare, saviour of the team, is leaving. Oh well!

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

  • Most likely the problem is not ‘knowing’. So, (1) re-training is a distraction; (2) Behaving is the issue; (3) That means culture,

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

  • Trophy employees, their sugar company and its useful idiots

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

  • The market for Second Hand Thoughts is flourishing, never been so huge. But outsourcing your mind is the ultimate laziness.

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

  • Does the distinction ‘leader-manager’ need to be retired? I dare to suggest.

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

  • Science advances by a series of funerals. And some management practices are not feeling very well.

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

  • 20 years of experience, or 1 year of experience repeated 20 times?

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

  • Two way in vivo fertilization Human Resources – Business. The 2015 Protocol.

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

  • Research is a Google search repeated. ‘Hominem unius Google timeo’ (you may need to Re-Google this)

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

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

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

  • Memo to all corporate supporting functions: You are fired. Reapply now. Lines are open

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

  • Human Resources and People in the Payroll, not the same thing anymore.

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

  • The company as an information highway? Managers as regulators of information traffic

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

  • Great players, great training, wrong game

    It’s a new world out there. You’ll realize this truth if you open the windows of your organization and let […]

  • Teamocracies and Networkracies have different citizens: in-habitants in team-work, riders in net-work.

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

  • Madam, the ribbon is free.

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

  • Four types of Employee Engagement, with the compliments of the German Army

    I was told sometime, somewhere, by somebody (you can see the strength of my recollection), and then found this again […]

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

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

  • The One secret of Warren Buffet (tip: it’s not a financial simulation or forecasting software)

    There is a tradition of looking into the secrets of successful people such as Warren Buffet. In his case, there […]

  • Innovation? Great, but I am not in charge of it!

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

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      Daily Thoughts

    September 27th, 2023

    Redefining Talent Wealth

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    The ‘Impossible To Disagree With’ School Of Management

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    ´Busy-Ness’ Is A Trap

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    Write a script, not a strategic plan

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

    3 self-sabotaging mechanisms in organizations

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

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

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

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

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

    Scale It – Introducing 1 of my 40 rules of change

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

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

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

    Campaign It… is 1 of my 40 rules of change

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

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

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

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

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

    Corporate tribes, intellectual ghettos and open window policies

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

    Peer Networks are the strongest force of action inside the organization

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