Author Archives: David
← Older postsLead Like a Gardener! – Agile and Design Thinking Will Become Management Fads Unless We Expand Our Concept of Management
This blog is a shortened version of a full-length article Lead Like a Gardener that appeared in Medium earlier this week. Management is notoriously faddish. Managers can reflect on a long line of management innovations that attracted huge attention, were widely … Continue reading
Management Needs to Return to Reason
‘The arts of life…turn out to possess their own special methods and techniques…Bad judgement here consists not in failing to apply the methods of natural science, but, on the contrary, in over-applying them’. Isaiah Berlin, Political Judgement Ever since the … Continue reading
Cattle, Slaves and Automobiles: Driving Dangerously With Management Clichés
Language is rooted in metaphor. In their popular book, Metaphors We Live By (1982) George Lakoff and Mark Johnson showed the pervasive role that our embodied experience plays in our understanding of how the world works, or might work. We … Continue reading
Management: a Noble Practice
The theme of the 2017 Global Drucker Forum to be held in Vienna later this year is “Growth & Inclusive Prosperity – The Secular Management Challenge”. Dictionary definitions of prosperity mention a condition of being successful or thriving, especially economic … Continue reading
Renewing the American Republic: The Ecodynamics of Donald Trump Part II
In the early hours of Wednesday November 9 2016 I was as bemused as everyone else. Donald Trump had won the presidential election and would be the 45th President of the United States. The last polls I saw had given … Continue reading
Wells Fargo: Culture Eats Strategy (again) and (this time) the CEO
Over the decades organizational culture has devoured hundreds, if not thousands of strategies. One of the most recent examples is the case of Wells Fargo, where culture not only ate a long-standing, apparently successful strategy but last week also consumed … Continue reading
Brexit: Crisis and Opportunity for Britain and the EU – a Systems Perspective
“In a multi-layered complex system stability is achieved by having the big and/or slow processes govern through constraint the smaller, faster processes. Sudden change can take place in a complex system when agents at one level escape the constraints usually … Continue reading
Why Business Books Still Speak Volumes
It’s easy to be critical of business books. What had been a dull cottage industry until the publication of Tom Peters; and Bob Waterman’s In Search of Excellence (1982) became an exuberant enterprise that churns out a vast number of … Continue reading
Bloody Ships – Bloody Systems: A Managerial Reflection on the Centenary of the Battle of Jutland
“There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today…” remarked Vice Admiral David Beatty to his Flag Captain. Beatty was commander of the Battle Cruiser Fleet at Jutland, and his cool comment belied the scale of the catastrophe. … Continue reading
Down With Descartes! If You Can’t Measure It You Had Better Manage It
In Landmarks of Tomorrow (1959) Peter Drucker wrote “We still profess and we still teach the world-view of the past three hundred years… a Cartesian world-view.” It is a world-view redefined by Lord Kelvin (1824-1907): “… when you can … Continue reading
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