On Tuesday, we were in Venice, Italy to kick off our course for SMEs on managing complexity through Systemic Management by invitation of the Fondazione Università Ca Foscari. The classroom was called ‘Infinity’ and that name seems like an auspicious start. We are particularly thrilled to begin this path of learning with a group of […]
Managing Risk and 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 An article in Mashable about Google+ is a […]
Thinking and Reasoning for Leadership Are Urgently Needed and Can Be Learned
Are we really capable of thinking and reasoning? Even a superficial glance at newspaper articles seem to suggest that we are not exercising these capacities. Joined up thinking is scarce. There is a crisis of leadership as one catastrophic decision after another shapes the lives of workers and citizens. The world is complex Our reality has […]
Nothing Is the Same: How to Survive and Thrive in Today’s Market
This month marks ten years since the start of the 2007 financial crisis. Our economic models have failed us. Anyone who has lived with the aftermath of that crisis knows that. Many have lost their jobs, or lost their investments and even their future prospects. Many who expected to have a smooth career path are getting […]
How a CIO Can Learn to Drive Real Business Results
Ideally, the role of the CIO should be to manage the Quality of how humans and technology interact to produce real business results. In reality, CIOs today find themselves constrained in what they can achieve operationally. On the one hand, they need to be able to improve business performance. This leads them to want to […]
Beyond the Comfort Zone for Organizations
The problem with comfort zones is that we stick with them even when they are no longer fit for purpose. We prefer to squeeze ourselves into an awkward space as long as it’s familiar, rather than expanding into the unknown. Comfort zones prevent us from doing anything that goes beyond what we already know. In […]
Performance Optimization and Interdependencies: When 1+1= More Than 2
What happens when more than one person or more than one thing work together in the same direction? Is the result just the simple sum of their efforts? The answer to this question is yes, but ONLY when the elements involved are independent of each other. In the theory of systems, the global “performance” of any […]
How CIOs Can Break Free of the Silo Prison with Systemic Management
What if there were a way to break free of the silo prison? What if we could build an organization where the best qualified could fully contribute and unleash their potential, where there was engagement, transparency, efficient communication and sharing of information? Well, there is. And CIOs are perfectly poised to change the music and spearhead the transformation. […]
Four Fundamental Strands of Knowledge for Managers and Leaders
Although the majority of organizations are divided up into functions and silos (and suffer every day from the ill-effects of that) they are in fact one system. They simply do not see it because of an out of date approach to management based on vertical hierarchy and local optima. What do we mean when we […]
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 […]
