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.
The Saint Francis School of Management – ‘when necessary use words’.
The Saint Francis School of Management is at the top of my personal ranking. It was created in the 13th Century in Assisi, Italy, and had one single amalgamated course on communications, change, leadership and organizational development. The course was very short. In fact, the training book contained one single page with a single sentence: ‘Preach the Gospel all the time; when necessary use words.’ An entire worldview, an entire lifestyle, an entire leadership system, from this ‘use words when necessary’.
‘Preach the Gospel all the time; when necessary use words.’ In many organizations, the motto seems to be ‘preach the thing all the time, and if necessary, preach again, don’t stop preaching, preaching is good. They need to get it’
People often say, organizations have a big communication problem.
People often say, organizations have a big communication problem. I agree. But the problem is not that they communicate too little, but that they communicate too much. Channels are saturated. People don’t distinguish between signal and noise anymore. The greater the communicating, the bigger the noise. Several corporate functions and their initiatives are competing for airtime, and it’s only Wednesday afternoon. If you want to improve communication, want to have a healthy communication strategy, communicate less.
It’s a disturbing thought, but we overcommunicate. We have been told ‘communicate, communicate, communicate, never cease to communicate’. Which is, in itself, a form of overcommunication. We overcommunicate because we lack imagination and putting things on fancy PowerPoints comes in very handy. If we communicated less, we might even get more attention.
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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 [2].
[1]
Visit The Flipping Point [1] to learn more about the book and other services:
Request [3] a keynote and Q&A on topics from the book.
[4] Request [3] one of our webinars:
- The myths of change. How traditional management and academic thinking is responsible for the colossal failure of change programmes. Debunking uncontested assumptions. Looking at the alternatives.
- The myths of company culture. Stuck in old concepts. How we have made cultural change hard and often impossible. The failure of communication programmes. The key to successful mobilizing of people for a purpose.
- The myths of management. Empowerment, ownership, accountability and other little challenged ideas. Non-management myths. What new management may look like.