The world’s been turned upside down. ‘Normal’ life has been completely disrupted. We’ve been shoved through the COVID-19 doorway into a Brave New World and we are staring and blinking and trying to take it all in. It’s a confusing mix of the old and the new. It’s work, Jim, but not as we know […] Read More…
You know what’s not on an org chart? People. Odd that, isn’t it? I mean, isn’t that the point of an org chart, to show where people fit in the organisation? Actually, no. What is on the org chart is the boxes that the people fit into. The roles, the positions, the grades and the […] Read More…
It’s not surprising that in this in this age of technological revolution, many people reach for metaphors based on the invention of the age, the computer. They talk about ‘rebooting the system’, ‘installing new software’ and ‘re-programming’ things (sometimes, rather chillingly, they mean the people). They are trying to get across complex ideas in a […] Read More…
This is a famous painting by Renee Magritte of a pipe, that carries the legend ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’ (This is not a pipe). Well, it’s not, it’s a painting of a pipe. In fact, it’s a painting of a thing we call ‘a pipe’. The thing is what we put tobacco in and […] Read More…
“You must innovate to survive” has become something of a truism in today’s business environment and yet many companies and large organisations are hopeless at innovation. It doesn’t matter how much the leadership team say they are going to innovate or how many team away days, corporate hack-a-thons, suggestion boxes or way-out schemes they try, […] Read More…
I always expected to have a job, by which I mean a permanent employment contract for a large organisation. That was the way of my parents and my grand-parents and I never really gave it any thought. It’s just what you did. ‘Having a job’ was a lazy shorthand for having a particular lifestyle and […] Read More…
There are many sound and compelling business reasons why we should be rehumanising our organisations, putting the people upfront and central to the whole enterprise. When you give people a purpose to work, treat them as whole human beings and trust them with the freedom and autonomy to decide for themselves what to do, there […] Read More…
A widely-held view of a leader is someone who tells other people what to do, the one who gives the orders. It’s not a view I subscribe to but it is often an explicit part of the role for someone in a formal leadership position and the reality is those people have, and use, this […] Read More…
Most organisational change projects fail to deliver the desired outcomes. Many transformations fall short of their goals. A couple of years after they have ‘delivered’ it is often found that many of the old cultural values, behaviours and hierarchies have reasserted themselves. The reason for this is that these projects are applied to the mechanics […] Read More…
The digital revolution is dramatically affecting our personal and professional lives with both positive and negative effects. Whilst the effects are hard to predict and difficult to control but we can, and should, focus on the outcomes that we want to maximise. We have to decide what the point of digital is, decide why we […] Read More…