25 Tuesday Feb 2014
Posted in complexity, consulting, design thinking, innovation, knowledge, management, problem solving, strategy
Tags
Alignment, complexity, Criteria, Innovation, Performance, Peter Drucker, phase transitions, Portfolio, Qualitative Leaps, Quantitative, strategy
When people ask me what it is that I do, they often act surprised and sometimes suspicious upon hearing my answer: “I solve wicked problems with undefined parameters”; yes, really.
20 Thursday Feb 2014
Tags
Boss, Business Talent Group, Charles Handy, Economy, Elephants, Fleas, Freelance, hierarchy, management, Middlemen, Roger Martin, Talent
I ended my initial post on this topic with a pointer to the so-called “freelance economy”. In this post I want to take this thread further, as I think it can shed light into the future of employment.
What I was implying at the end of my initial post is that reducing or even doing away with “middleman” corporate hierarchies in a post-materialistic, fluid economy of ideas doesn’t lead to anarchy. Rather it logically leads to a “freelance economy”, a world where, in British management philosopher Charles Handy’s words, free-floating freelancer “fleas” service multiple corporate “elephants” following the need for their specific talents.
19 Wednesday Feb 2014
Posted in business, human capital, management, Organizational Development
Tags
Boss, Career, Corporations, Customer, Executives, Manager, Market, Middlemen, Performance Appraisals, Professional Growth
For all you hard-working, well behaved corporate folk out there I suggest you wake up from the illusion of getting ahead by meeting or even exceeding your performance objectives. You will get that occasional 7.5% annual raise and you may even get a bonus once in a while, but it’s all part of a linear revenue ascendance mostly eroded by inflation or even wiped out by the occasional Wall Street black swan that dissolves your wealth.
18 Tuesday Feb 2014
Posted in Crisis, future, human capital, learning, society, technology
Tags
Answers, Conspiracy Theory, effectiveness, Efficiency, Idiosyncrasies, Machine, Questions, Recruitment, Skills, Society, Talent, Technology
Conspiracy theories vs. idiosyncrasies
I for one am no big fan of conspiracy theories. I see them as the construct of minds unable to grasp modern life’s intricacies. The fact that few of us manage to agree within the same family leaves me suspicious as to the proliferation of occult groups with the coherence to pull the world’s strings – that is assuming they would possess the means. I have however become convinced that society doesn’t need conspiracies to create its own self-imposed idiosyncrasies which in turn come with a hefty price.
17 Monday Feb 2014
Posted in capitalism, human capital, problem solving, society, taxonomy
Tags
creativity, Currency, Economy, George Gilder, Harvard Business Review, Knowledge, Liquidity, Money, Peter Drucker, Roger Martin
The road from the Renaissance to the iPhone might have taken much longer had the world not invented modern banking and finance. Money, an abstraction of value, is indeed a necessary precursor to globalization. It is also the source of systemic crises when the abstraction loses touch with the underlying value as when sophisticated financial instruments become self-referential.
The art and science of the possible 