The word “empowerment “ has been applied so broadly that it is now meaningless. It has become “a catch-all and therefore empty word” as pointed out in reference to women by Hadley Freeman in her article (‘From shopping to naked selfies, how ‘empowerment’ lost its meaning’.) Sadly, with the overuse of certain words, many terms […]
New Essential Skills for Leaders in the Digital and Decentralized Age
There are new essential skills that leaders and managers need to acquire and that Business Schools are not offering. In the 21st century, organizations need to shift away from the artificial limitations of traditional hierarchies and silos and this change does require a cognitive shift. As we pointed out in our post Bulldoze business Schools? A New […]
Structuring Collaboration for Results
We are becoming increasingly aware of the need for collaboration and cooperation. This is not yet the mainstream for management and organizations, but the more complexity becomes the backdrop and context of what we do and experience, the more we need to find up-to-date ways to exist within that complexity. Is it just about being […]
Beyond Logic: Tools for Intelligent Emotions (not just Emotional Intelligence)
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 […]
Continuous Innovation: Why Leaders Must Upgrade Their Thinking Skills
There is a lot of noise in our world today about innovation, particularly technological innovation. Undoubtedly, technology is a powerful aid to sustain transformation, but we need to understood what innovation really means. For managers and leaders, the question of innovation and technology has to be a fundamental part of their education process. Innovation Can (and Must) Be […]
Systemic Tools against Bias for Good Decisions about Risk
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 (Are you listening, Amazon?)
An article in ‘Business Insider’ this month revisits what it’s like to work at Amazon. While there may have been some improvement since the 2015 NYT article that referred to a bruising culture and people crying at their desks, there still seems to be evidence of exploitation. There is only one kind of exploitation in organizations […]
Managing Risk through a Leverage Point (constraint) – A Systems View
In our last post Understanding Uncertainty and Systemic Risk in Organizations 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 […]
Understanding Uncertainty and Systemic Risk in Organizations
If we could predict the outcome of everything we do with mathematical certainty, then our lives would be much simpler. In reality, we exist within a complex web of interdependencies and such certainty is not possible. Hence, we live with uncertainty and its inevitable companion: risk. We perceive a risk any time we feel that […]
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 […]
