Our brains really struggle to be rational. This is a big problem when it comes to management and making decisions, especially decisions about risk. What can we do about it? The improbability of probability The human mind is unable to process probability. It’s a scientific fact proved over the last 20 years in a slew of publications (and […]
Exploit the Constraint, Not Your People (sorry, Mr Amazon)
The recent articles and surrounding debate about how tough it is to work at Amazon relate to exploitation. There is only one kind of exploitation in organizations that is permissible and useful. And it doesn’t involve crying in the bathroom. Setting the goal Hearing about the bruising behaviour at Amazon, where people allegedly often cry at their […]
Managing Risk through Constraints – Part 3 of a Deming-Goldratt take on Risk Management
Risk and Constraints In our last post we explained how management must involve the management of variation. Every single process, relationship and communication in our organization, whether we are aware of it or not, is affected by variation. If we ignore variation then we are not managing, and if we are not managing then “risk […]
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 […]
Thinking of Your Organization as a Whole Will Improve Performance
When things get complicated in organizations, we can be tempted to “break them up” to try and simplify. Divide and conquer. That just makes matters worse. Why? Because organizations are in fact whole systems. Everything inside is interconnected and interdependent, so when we try and manage them any differently we inevitably underperform. By not seeing […]
Losing Control: Why We Must Transform Organizations Today
Our world has changed. Especially since the global financial crisis. Our reality is complex, that means it’s dense with interconnections and interdependencies that we cannot ignore. We can’t just think about what goes on inside our organizations (complicated enough) but how they interact with and impact stakeholders and entire supply chains. It’s hardly surprising so many managers feel […]
How We Achieved Laser Focus and Acceleration in One Meeting (with a Prerequisite Tree )
I recently participated in a meeting for an innovative digital project where speed is now of the essence. We were able to surface assumptions that saved us endless conversations, weeks of delay and false starts based on misunderstandings. In that meeting I saw in action, yet again, the power of a Thinking Process Tool from the […]
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 […]
The Leaders We Need Today
A leader is someone who connects with something deep inside you and brings out the leader in all of us. Ghandi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, these are some of the great leaders of our times. They inspired people to go beyond what they thought they were capable of to achieve something momentous for the […]
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 […]
