November 2014

• The healing smell of a corporate bonfire. (The Hernan Cortes Exit strategy).
• The ‘Keep Moving’ strategy always wins.
• The ‘who-does-what’ and the ‘who-knows-what’ models of the organization, lead to different worlds.
• The company as an information highway? Managers as regulators of information traffic
• Visit the Google graveyard and pay your respects
• ‘What you said was so confused that one could not tell whether it was nonsense or not’.
• Management ‘post-hoc fallacies’, but damn good stories!
• ‘Paths, not works’. A philosopher’s metaphor that explains well our leadership challenges.
• ‘Simplify, then exaggerate’: a saying from journalism, with different versions in our organizations
• Not all high caffeine shots of motivation work well. Inspirational stories have pros and cons.
• My local bakery inspired me
• Not even bottom-up. Certainly not top-down. Lasting organizational change is a polycentric social movement, or it isn’t.
• Big Banks have been fined again. A tiny fraction of the fines with the right behavioural change approach would change their cultures for ever.
• Failure has become a badge of honour in some places. Or at least, something to show on the CV as an asset.
• ‘I told them once; they didn’t understand. I told them twice; they didn’t understand. I told them three times … and I understood’
• The only common feature that successful companies share, is that they are not failing.
• Not all ambiguity in the organization is bad. There is, in fact, ‘good ambiguity’ and ‘bad ambiguity’.
• If you want to increase employee engagement and employee satisfaction, increase your company performance (yes, the order is not a typo)
• Great players, great training, wrong game
• The Lego and the Jigsaw: two ways to build an organization
• Every successful company’s growth contains seeds of failure. At some point, organizational complexity could outweigh the business benefits.
• Lose control, to gain more control (2/2) Starting the Control Diet
• Lose control, to gain more control (1/2) : The paradox and the symptoms
• The cost of checking. Looking at number one cause of organizational ineffectiveness.
• Preserving the problem when dedicated to finding the solution.
• ‘I am now senior enough that I only ask questions’
• A small family farm in Italy: my old MBA had the wrong toolkits
• Teamocracies and Networkracies have different citizens: in-habitants in team-work, riders in net-work.
• Madam, the ribbon is free.
• It’s now official: change is ‘activist’ driven. There is now a McKinsey article on this. Wait a minute. Viral Change was first published in 2006