Globalization is accelerating interdependencies among nations. A complex web of trade and power creates wellbeing as well as wars and this triggers patterns of migration that have always existed but never with such speed. Financial crisis, austerity and diminishing quality of life opens space for populist messages to take hold. Discontented citizens look to nationalism […]
The New Leadership Skills for Complexity
If Business Schools are churning out people with the skills that are not adequate for today’s complex world, how do we prepare people to work with complexity? It’s not enough to berate the fact that Business Education is lagging behind. We need to find a valid replacement. What kind of education will serve people to […]
Why Business Education is Failing
Dr. Deming said it years ago – MBAs teach students to raid companies, not to manage them. In her new book Makers & Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business, Rana Foroohar, assistant managing editor at Time, points a finger at business education. She states that in spite of the increase in people studying […]
Everything Is a Project
When you really think hard about it, everything we do of any relevance is a project. With the exception of repetitive processes, e.g. bookkeeping, whether it’s creating something from scratch, manufacturing a product, on-boarding a new employee or pitching to a new customer, all these activities require resources with certain competencies to carry out tasks that […]
How Can We Solve the Urgent Crisis in Project Management?
How many things in our lives are affected by poor project management? We probably can’t even imagine. Time, resources and money are wasted every day around the globe when projects fail to deliver. When it comes to IT, this is an urgent problem. Our lives depend increasingly on software and digitalization is causing that dependence […]
The Risk of Not Working to a Goal Plan? Just Filling Your Time
No matter how busy we may be doing stuff during the day, that “busyness” is not necessarily a measure of progress. In fact, if we haven’t established a goal plan for our work for the year, quarter, month or day, then we really don’t know what we’re doing or why. Unless, of course, our goal […]
The Stories We Tell About Ourselves – Narrative and Trust
There’s a lot of talk about narrative these days. In fact, we all tell stories all the time – from what we communicate to customers about our brand, goods and services to the voice inside our head that is constantly “telling” us who we are (hopefully, not too many voices at one time.) So do we […]
Simplify Your Hierarchy For Speed and Reliability
Let’s make a radical statement about success and organizations: all that matters for the success of an organization and those who work within it is speed and reliability. Think about that for a second. How many organizations can actually say that they are designed for this? Isn’t it true that layers of bureaucracy and the […]
Procrastination – Don’t Let it Bite
Procrastination is one of the greatest enemies of productivity and can play havoc with project management. On top of that, it can chip away at self-esteem. How can we help ourselves and others to overcome something so insidious and yet so common? Can’t Do Won’t Do? One of the reasons for procrastination is reasonably simple […]
Fear in the Workplace – How to Drive it Out
Most organizations were created and are still managed by people whose cognitive skills and careers have been formed in a pre-digital era. This means people that work in them are measured and managed by people who developed their careers according to the mindset and mechanisms of the pre-digital reality. How can we make sure that valuable […]