16 Tuesday Jul 2013
Posted in business, management, Organizational Development
Tags
Alignment, Consensus, convergence, democracy, Diversity, Experience, Leadership, mental models, Organizations, Thatcher, Totalitarian Regimes, Trust
I don’t believe in descriptive instantiations of leadership – and even less so in prescriptive recipes. Paraphrasing Thatcher’s “being a leader is like being a lady”, describing what leadership is or how it can be enacted defeats the very purpose.
03 Wednesday Jul 2013
Tags
business, Empower, Hints, human capital, management, Organizational Development, Talent, value, wisdom
“Managing” true talent is a misnomer. Subjecting the truly inspired to rules is akin to plowing fields with Ferraries – yes it might just work, but it sure is stupid. Use the talented rather for creating the recipes around which the hoards of less inspired can be assembled and scaled. In the same vein, don’t compensate the truly talented by the hour or with a fixed income: you would in effect incentivize them to limit their imagination. Strategy and vision are holistic products, they cannot be bought or measured by the hour, and don’t bow to quantitative rewards.
So then how can you empower the talented? Here’s a few hints.
25 Tuesday Jun 2013
Posted in Crisis, Organizational Development, Uncategorized
Compromise when you can, but accept that sometimes conflict is unavoidable.
Conflict is always lurking, only a well articulated opinion away. But sometimes conflict is irrational, it has nothing to do with what one thinks or does. Conflict can appear simply because of the way someone is reflects badly by contrast on what someone else is not.
21 Friday Jun 2013
Posted in business, capitalism, Organizational Development, society, strategy
Tags
2008 financial crisis, business, Enron, Invention, Machiavelli, Morality, Society, Speculation, strategy, Wall Street
With Enron still in recent collective memory, business has not fully recovered its morality and ethics standing. And the 2008 financial crisis didn’t help, in fact lowering trust in the world’s business establishment. So the question of whether morality and profitability in business can be symbiotic is fair. I had not really formed an opinion on this issue until the very recent past, when several incidents in my professional life gave me no choice but to do so.
And so, having pondered the issue, I believe there is an answer that constructively transcends the growing divide between the pro-profit and anti-corporate, anti-globalization groups. In short, business success doesn’t have to be synonymous with immorality. The key to achieving a symbiosis between profitability and morality is in my opinion a combination of strategy and invention.
13 Thursday Jun 2013
Posted in business, human capital, management, Organizational Development
We all like to think of ourselves as moderate, reasonable beings, but as a society are never too far from extreme viewpoints – call it the peer pressure effect or our desire to fit in. As an example, the collective view on leadership has swung completely from the authoritative, masculine figure exerting total control to the unobtrusive nurturer of talent. We made no pause along the way to ponder the possibility of exaggeration and overreaction. Dare say the leader still has a very real and involved role in the organization and you are likely to be black listed and deemed a heretic nowadays. Say the leader should politely evaporate, and the audience immediately erupts in applause.
06 Thursday Jun 2013
Let me attempt a positive twist to Napoleon’s “all’s fair in love and war” as applied to the world of business. Let me first propose that Napoleon’s insightful correlation can be extended to business in the first place. Love, war and business all have in common the competitive side of human nature – for the sake of procreation in the first case, and for survival in the other two. In all cases things have a high likelihood of becoming (very) personal, and when things get personal emotions usually flare.
18 Saturday May 2013
Posted in business, Communication, complexity, Crisis, future, human capital, management, Organizational Development, paradox, philosophy, society
Tags
Ackoff, Ambiguity, Black Swans, business, complexity, Corporations, Disorder, Dissonance, Drucker Forum 2013, False Comfort, future, Hamel, Hollnagel, Humanity, Individuality, Industrial Revolution, management, Organizational Development, paradox, philosophy, Predictability, Professional Fulfillment, Resilience, Resonance, Scale, Snowden, Society, Taleb, Variance, Wall Street
With all the benefits derived from the advances in standard of living, our modern society suffers from an apparent paradox which can be best paraphrased as “if everyone is special, then no one is”.
We strive for individuality even as the economic affluence required to express ourselves is increasingly tied to economies of scale and the uniformity they foster. We do our best to proclaim our uniqueness to the world on social media pages, but have to make use of highly standardized templates in the process. We share in the belief (and rightfully so) that the very success of our modern society depends on scale, yet it is precisely scale that appears to generate confusion when it comes to the most intimate aspects of our human identity.
14 Tuesday May 2013
Posted in business, Communication, complexity, consulting, human capital, learning, Organizational Development, society
Tags
Coercion, Communication, Complex Adaptive Systems, complexity, culture, Cynefin, Dave Snowden, Human Behavior, Language, Leadership, Psychology, Resonance, SenseMaker, Slogans
I ran into this blog by Dave Snowden and I was absolutely impressed with the insights he introduces on communication being a double edged sword: illuminating on one hand, or having the potential to be used to coerce. He proposes that context-devoid slogans found on corporate posters and value statements don’t serve any educational or inspirational purpose, and rather quite the opposite: they often become tools for coercion driving a compliance organizational culture.
08 Wednesday May 2013
In my blog entry arguing for a unified theory of management, I proposed that most top management reference a fundamental distinction between exploration of new knowledge (i.e. innovation) and exploitation of existing knowledge (i.e. efficient operations).
Business and indeed the entire society is caught in an evolutionary dynamic that balances exploration and exploitation – see David Hurst’s ecological perspective. While the exploitation cycle is amenable to incremental thinking, exploration appears to be prone to discontinuities – hard to predict leaps of logic.
25 Thursday Apr 2013
Posted in complexity, consulting, human capital, management, Organizational Development, science, strategy, taxonomy, technology
Tags
Analytic Thinking, bureaucracy, business, complexity, effectiveness, Engineering, future, management, models, philosophy, Validity
The most important function of management, particularly executive management, is setting future direction. That implies decisions and choices about the present and future.
Because engineering thinking or more broadly speaking analytic thinking predominates in many executive and consulting circles, it is believed that decisions require a degree of rigorousness similar to that of the scientific method in natural sciences. And so, it is firmly believed that analytic tools empower managers to make sound decisions. The result is a myriad of tools reminiscent of engineering speak – frameworks, trade-spaces, matrices – packaged in neat Power Point slides.
This all very good, but, as philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers remarks “tools are demanding – they do not confer the power of judging, they ask for the choice of the right tool for the right situation; in other words they oblige us to think and wonder”. The danger that Stengers cautions against is the rigid interpretation of the power of tools. Tool power should never be situated above human judgement. And when it does, this results in the tools getting a life of their own, and embedding the human element which is helpless to escape their hold. This ultimately results in a bureaucratic construct as the purpose of humans becomes not the seeking of meaning and validity, but rather the maintenance and upgrading of the tools. This also results in a proliferation of enforcer types at the expense of creative types, reducing the number and quality of choices about the future.
A more progressive view of management tools is as “enlightening abstractions, precious new tools for thinking” rather than “ready made instruments”. Also, in Stenger’s view, the relationship between user and tool is not one-directional; rather, “tools modify the ones who use them; to learn how to use a tool is to enter a new relation with reality, both an aesthetic and practical new relation”. In my experience, this dual directionality can also unfortunately work backwards: rigid tools can have a limiting effect on thinking.
Source of Isabelle Stengers quotations is “The Challenge of complexity: Unfolding the ethics of science – In Memoriam Ilya Prigogine”
Also check out Dave Snowden’s related blog entry.
The art and science of the possible 