List

Value creation

  • 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, […]

  • 5 things very successful leaders have in common

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

  • 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 […]

  • Organizational Decluttering: A crusade in waiting that may need you as leader

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

  • The only common feature that successful companies share, is that they are not failing.

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

  • 8 hard arguments on culture for people who think this is is fluffy, woolly, soft stuff

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

  • Would you like a 3 hour appendectomy or a 1 hr one?

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

  • Team, the noun, the structure, or teaming up, the verb, the behaviour?

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

  • Plan for the intended, watch the unintended, embrace the extended

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

  • Memo: Permission never required, so don’t ask.

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

  • Which benchmarking data did you use to fall in love?

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

  • You can’t plan for unintended consequences, but you want as many good ones to emerge

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

  • ‘Bottom up’ is not more workshops at the bottom. That is just a migration of the top-down to a lower level.

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

  • Sharing thoughts, being carriers, and why there are no idiots anymore.

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

  • I’m now of an age when I only want to work with people who want to change the world

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

  • Thought leadership is making people think, or there is not much thought or leadership. Maybe journalistic leadership?

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

  • The curious case of management bad sync: the video and the audio don’t match

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

  • No more change please, we need change-ability.

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

  • The answer to Trumpism: get involved, call out the in-human, the non-truth. Start inside the organization.

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

  • Best Practice is dead and Benchmarking is not feeling very well

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

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      Daily Thoughts

    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 […]
    September 30th, 2022

    Change that doesn’t deliver change-ability is a waste

    The traditional model of change is the one I call ‘destination’ type, that is, how to go from A to […]
    September 23rd, 2022

    Company structures: aggregate and disaggregate

    New organizations, and old ones in the business of transforming themselves, would be better off learning by heart these two […]
    September 15th, 2022

    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 […]
    September 2nd, 2022

    The best organizational model is to have more than one under the same roof

    Command and control management has fewer friends, and it’s quite terminally ill as well. The heirs are fighting for a piece […]
    August 26th, 2022

    Unprecedented Times? Sure. Let’s Move On Please.

    Somewhere in the post-Covid peak, I promised myself that I wasn’t going to pay attention anymore to anything that starts with […]
    August 19th, 2022

    Engagement, Empowerment and Ownership Culture Meet at One Single Point. Obvious, Simple and Incredibly Forgotten

    Employee engagement efforts, ownership values and empowerment behaviours must meet at one point. It’s simple, not terribly controversial, based upon […]
    August 12th, 2022

    Employee Engagement and the Productivity Magnet

    For me, the most damaging use of the employee engagement framework is the widespread one that states that ‘engagement’ predicts […]