The challenges facing organizations today are rapid, complex and unknown. They struggle to read the stimuli, absorb them and react within a timeframe that is now necessary. That is because their design and leadership model is still rooted in an outdated, mechanical understanding of reality. How can organizations adapt? The hierarchical functional model is failing […]
Can Doing Good Be Good for Business?
A lot of language connected with business has to do with aggression. Not only that, a lot of behavior in business can be aggressively competitive. Phrases like ‘eat what you kill’ illustrate the point. So do businesses have to be ruthlessly self-interested and aggressive to be successful? Is a zero-sum mentality the only way? The […]
Everyone Can Win: Why We Need A New Economics
In his monumental work ‘The New Economics’, W. Edwards Deming states: ‘It would be better if everyone would work together as a system, with the aim for everybody to win. What we need is cooperation and transformation to a new style of management.’ Instead, many people perceive that corporations place profit over people, self-interest over justice, and […]
Words and Variation: Eliminate Misunderstanding
We all use words all the time. The problem is, the same word can have a variety of meanings for different people. If we want work to go smoothly it’s important to make sure that people can understand each other. People who learn English in the UK and America all learn ‘English’ but there are […]
Design Your Processes, Design Your Reality
A recent afternoon was spent looking at the meticulous flowcharts of processes drawn up by an innovative software company for a client. It was something the client had never done for themselves. They were astonished when they saw the result. What did they reveal? Many people, especially in more traditional sectors, are accustomed to just […]
Why Organizations Get Stuck
Every kind of organization aspires to achieve its goal with increasing effectiveness. In order to do so, it has to do two fundamental things: grow innovate It has to grow because every living organism is either growing or its dying. It has to innovate because the reality it interacts with is constantly evolving. To […]
How to Create a Unifying Vision and Plan
How do you take a group of separate companies and/or individuals all with different backgrounds and skills and get them to contribute towards a project? How can they have a unifying vision and plan to work on together? Together we stand It’s hard to get any group of people to agree on something even when […]
How Should We Treat the Foreigners in our Midst?
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 […]
