Extracts taken from my new book The Flipping Point. [1] A flipping point in the trend for adopting absurd management ideas needs to be reached. The Flipping Point [1] contains 200 short vignettes exploring what ’deprogramming management’ may look like. Read a recent review [2].
Non-magic: what is the latest intelligence and new data? Magic: what’s the story?
Non-magic: give me feedback from the strategy meeting today. Magic: so, what’s the story? Non-magic: mum, could you explain to me again how the dragon leveraged his competitive advantage to get to the princess? (don’t worry, it’s not going to happen).
Non-magic: what is the latest intelligence and new data? Magic: what’s the story? The magic, non magic collection would go for ever. I have always hated the sanitised corporate language. The exaggerated and disruptive language of Ronald D Laing [3], a British psychiatrist who died in 1989, father of the then called ‘antipsychiatry movement’ and a figure who all of us, standard and medicalised psychiatrists in white coats, hated at that time, because it was ‘the right thing to do’, said in his complaining and critical mode: ‘Gone is any language of joy, delight, passion, sex, violence. The language is that of the boardroom.’ The last bit stuck in my head.
Non-magic question: what’s the cost of doing this? Magic question: what would be the cost of not doing this?
Non-magic question: what are the goals and objectives? Magic question: what do we want to see by? Non-magic question: what are the outcomes? Magic question: what do we want to be proud of? Non-magic question: what’s the cost of doing this? Magic question: what would be the cost of not doing this?
Non-magic question: what are the goals and objectives? Reframing questions is at the core of Critical Thinking training, something that we do in my company.
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The Flipping Point [1] – Deprogramming Management. This book asks you to use more rigour and critical thinking in how you use assumptions and management practices that were created many years ago. Our real and present danger is not a future of robots and AI, but of current established BS. In this book, you are invited to the Mother of All Call Outs!
Available from major online bookstores [4].
[1]
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New webinar series – Register Now! [5]
Feed Forward webinar series – the organization now, under new management
Machines work on feed-back. Minds work on feed-forward. We don’t need thermostats; we need new compasses. There is no ‘back to normal’. Normal has not been waiting for us. Leandro Herrero
To change to ‘the new normal’ we must think and act differently in the management of our organizations. Join Leandro Herrero and his team of organizational architects for these 5, free webinars as they debunk uncontested assumptions and uncover the alternatives, whilst considering why this is even more relevant today in the current exceptional environment. Join us and bring your critical thinking brain, switched on. It’s a serious business. It may also be fun.
Each participant who attends any of the live webinars of the Feed Forward series will be eligible for one copy of The Flipping Point. [1]
Webinar topics:
- The myths of change.
- Can we put the company in an MRI? Can we diagnose its health in terms of its internal connectivity, communication and collaboration?
- The myths of company culture.
- The myths of management.
- High touch and high tech in the digitalisation era