July 2014

• Using national cultural differences to explain everything, is a smokescreen for managerial incompetence.
• I’ll say it again: people are not resistant to change
• However…
• Corporate needs a 60’s counter-culture revolution, and these are five trends that could deliver it.
• DADYC? (Do Acronyms Drive You Crazy?)
• ‘Disruptive’: a word for all seasons, in need of a holiday.
• Independence is dead. Write your declaration of Inter-dependence
• It’s official: the single, magic bullet, that characterises good leadership is to back off.
• Bottom-lining everything is simply silly. Tell the bottom-liners to calm down and speak properly.
• Is the creative working unit ‘the pair’? It would be worth experimenting
• Corporate Botox
• Your Branding Department is your entire workforce
• Is ruthlessness a leadership strength?
• Rebels: they need a cause
• Heroes on the payroll: the good news and the bad news
• Solutionism as a culture: proficiency in problem solving
• We buy an elephant and then we train the elephant to behave like a gazelle.
• Leadership’s Splendid Expeditions
• ‘To save everything, click here’, and its version inside the company
• Don’t start with an alignment obsession. Dissent is good, creative tension even better.
• Why e-mail is a Class A drug for the mind
• Dear Business Development candidate: tell me about things that you have developed in life
• The company on a treadmill: devise routine Stress Tests
• ‘It depends’: when ethics, leadership, and values become flexible and adaptable
• Collective Leadership: Two Acid Tests.
• Trust is like pregnancy. You can’t have a bit of it
• Cultures are not created by training. Barclays is missing the point.
• Full of Embassies: The company is not an Internal Diplomatic Service
• Top Influencers 2, Top Leadership 1 (Hierarchical power in the organization is half of the ‘peer-to-peer’ power)
• For every empowering leader, there must be followers who want to be empowered
• The death of the charismatic leadership has been grossly exaggerated