We know that intelligence and emotions are not the same. Certainly, people may be capable of great intellectual prowess but be cold and unfeeling. Other people may be kind and generous without having any particular academic inclination. While there may be extreme cases, most of us, and especially leaders and managers, live with the delicate […]
Risk: The Crippling Cost of Fear
No one can deny that risk exists. It’s the potential to lose something of value. It would be irresponsible to ignore it. The question becomes, what kind of decisional practice and behaviors are operationally and economically effective when it comes to risk in organizations? Operating from fear A recent article in Mashable about Google+ is […]
Leaders For Transformation: The Power of Breakthrough
At Intelligent Management we work beyond improvement; our goal is to inspire and highlight a path to transformation. To transform what? The prevailing silo-based management style into one of system optimization. The word ‘sechel’, the title of one of our books, indicates in Hebrew precisely the intelligence required to achieve this: systemic intelligence, i.e. what […]
Empowerment – How and Why
What do we mean by empowerment and why is it such a tricky matter? What tools can we use to make sure empowerment is done more effectively? In our last post we looked at the transformational nature of the Theory of Constraints. The road to transformation is paved with actions. In any organization, things need […]
The Scottish Independence Vote – A Dilemma for Brave Hearts
The decision awaiting Scots tomorrow will shape the rest of their lives and those of their descendants. It will also impact the rest of the United Kingdom. Leading economists completely disagree about the implications. We give a personal (and genetically Scottish) take from a systemic thinking point of view. Anyone who has visited Scotland […]
Change or Don’t Change? Do You Have a Choice?
There is a fundamental conflict about change that we all face throughout our lives. If we can verbalize it in a general way, then we have an opportunity to deal with it every time it haunts us. If there is one thing we know we will face in life for certain, it’s change. From day […]
Don’t get stuck on thinking blocks. Think again, think better (systemically)
How can people keep thinking something when evidence around them is screaming a different reality? How can we make sure that thinking blocks don’t happen to us? It’s more common that we would like to believe. We may want to be independent thinkers, but we end up following the crowd, arriving at conclusions that are […]
Freeing Yourself from Limiting Beliefs
We’re getting ready to launch our new eBook ‘The Human Constraint’, a business novel for the New Economy. We’re excited to share a snippet of the accompanying online learning centre that accompanies each chapter of the novel. This section deals with limiting beliefs and a tool to overcome them. Assumptions and limiting beliefs In a chapter […]
Growth mindset? There’s an app for that – well, a thinking process tool
Do you feel as if you’re stuck the way you are or do you feel that you can grow? A book by a Stanford psychologist identifies a “fixed mindset” and a “growth mindset.” Depending on your mindset, you can profoundly influence your development and happiness. We look at a Thinking Process Tool to support continuous […]
How To Embed Creative Business Thinking In Your Organization
We may think we know how to think, but can we do it better? This post looks at some tools for systematic, creative thinking for business (and beyond). A recent article in the Globe and Mail newspaper asks the question, how can we produce more creative business thinkers? What sort of things should business schools […]