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Category Archives: Strategy

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Double Vision: “Boxes and Bubbles” Thirty Years On [Part II]

This is the second blog on the thirtieth anniversary of my article “Of Boxes, Bubbles and Effective Management” appearing in the May-June 1984 issue of the Harvard Business Review. I had been inspired to write the article when I read … Continue reading →

Posted in Change, General, Leadership, Strategy | Tagged Accelerate, adaptive cycle, Boxes & Bubbles, change, Chuang-tzu, Crisis & Renewal, ecocycle, ecological perspective, ecosystem, Holling, Kotter, McGilchrist, Tao Te Ching, Taoism, The New Ecology of Leadership, yang, yin | Comments Off on Double Vision: “Boxes and Bubbles” Thirty Years On [Part II]

The Double Vision: “Boxes and Bubbles” Thirty Years On [Part I]

“For double the vision my Eyes do see, And a double vision is always with me:” In 1984 the first article I ever wrote on management appeared in the May-June issue of the Harvard Business Review. Entitled “Of Boxes, Bubbles … Continue reading →

Posted in Change, General, Leadership, Strategy | Tagged Boxes & Bubbles, hard, Harvard Business Review, holism, Jay Galbraith, leveraged buyout, reflective practitioner, relationships, soft, systemic, Tao of Pooh, Taoism, task, yang, yin | Comments Off on The Double Vision: “Boxes and Bubbles” Thirty Years On [Part I]

The Nature of Uncertainty: Hunting Black Swans

This past week I gave the opening keynote at the 2014 Conference Board meeting on Enterprise Risk Management. It gave me an opportunity to bring an ecological perspective to risk and uncertainty as well as allowing me to promote The … Continue reading →

Posted in Change, General, Leadership, Strategy | Tagged algorithm, black swans, Cohen and Gooch, Confucius, COSO, Enterprise Risk Management, George Box, Guntram Werther, Jung, Kant, knowledge, Michael Mauboussin, models, Nassim Taleb, pattern, phronesis, risk, syncretic thinking, T-shaped, uncertainty, understanding | Comments Off on The Nature of Uncertainty: Hunting Black Swans

Exploring Leadership Using Metaphors

Last week I spent a day-and-a-half with a group of senior managers from a large global company discussing leadership. The company faces all the challenges one might expect it to face – globalization, digitization, cross-cultural difficulties and so on in … Continue reading →

Posted in Change, General, Leadership, Strategy | Tagged budget, CCL, Chuck Palus, David Horth, ecological perspective, financial forecasting, Leadership Metaphor Explorer, mental model, metaphor, performance management, The New Ecology of Leadership, Visual Explorer, VUCA | Comments Off on Exploring Leadership Using Metaphors

BOOM! – The Perils of Big-Bang Rollouts

Late last year Target, the Minneapolis-based American discount retail chain, suffered a massive data security breach. Just before the busy Christmas season hackers broke into the corporation’s computer systems and stole information from over 100 million of its credit and … Continue reading →

Posted in Change, Leadership, Strategy | Tagged big bang, change, ecological perspective, hacking, HMO, Hudson's Bay, Learning from the Links, Lowe's, Obamacare, Oxford Health Plans, positive deviance, RONA, security breach, Stephen Wiggins, systems, Target, W.T. Grant, Zellers | 1 Comment

Sweet But Dangerous: The Challenge of Institutional Change

There was a very interesting story in the Sunday Telegraph a couple of weeks ago about John Yudkin (1910-1995), a British physiologist and nutritionist who did pioneering work on the connection between the consumption of sugar and all manner of … Continue reading →

Posted in Change, Leadership, Strategy | Tagged Alfred Wegener, conscious capitalism, continental drift, fructose, institutional change, John Yudkin, paleomagnetism, sugar, Whole Foods | 2 Comments

Watch Your Language! Why Metaphors Matter in Management

It’s another launch of another strategic plan to the company’s senior and middle managers and the CEO is rattling on about “roadmaps” and “blueprints” that will generate “traction” in the market and “buy-in” from the employees. The employees are watching … Continue reading →

Posted in Change, General, Leadership, Strategy | Tagged Aristotle, blueprint, buy-in, change, ecological perspective, ecological rationality, embodied cognition, Gareth Morgan, George Lakoff, Gibson Burrell, Mark Johnson, metaphor, roadmap, Thomas Kuhn, top-down | 1 Comment

Skating To Where the Puck Is Going To Be: CVS Decides to Stop Selling Cigarettes

“Cigarettes have no place in an environment where healthcare is being delivered.” With these words, Larry Merlo, the CEO of CVS, the US second-largest drugstore chain, announced that they would be the first such chain to discontinue the sale of … Continue reading →

Posted in Change, General, Leadership, Strategy | Tagged American healthcare, business model, change, Clayton Christensen, community, diagnostics, disruption, drugstore chain, ecological perspective, ecosystem, facilitated network, general hospital, hernia, Innovator's Prescription, Jason Hwang, Jerome Grossman, lukemia, Minute Clinic, pharmacy, Roman Catholic Church, Shouldice Clinic, solution shop, subsidiarity, value-added process, Wayne Gretsky | Comments Off on Skating To Where the Puck Is Going To Be: CVS Decides to Stop Selling Cigarettes

The 3 “Rs” of Management: Rigour, Relevance and Rationality

The debate between rigour and relevance continues in management education, usually spurred by management professors’ concerns that practitioners are paying little attention to their research. The history of the problem is now familiar: in the first half of the 20th … Continue reading →

Posted in Change, General, Leadership, Strategy | Tagged Bloom, Carnegie Corporation, constructivist, ecological rationality, engineering, Ford Foundation, Hayek, Kahneman, Martin Wooldridge, Michael Raynor, Mumtaz Ahmed, rationality, relevance, Richard Rorty, rigour, rules, Schumpeter, System 1, System 2, The Economist, Van Reenen, Vernon Smith | Comments Off on The 3 “Rs” of Management: Rigour, Relevance and Rationality

Words are Easy, Numbers can be Faked, Behaviour is Difficult: The Case for Embodied Management

When I wrote Learning from the Links back in 2002 I was trying to make the case that management, like golf, was a practice and attempts to make progress in either activity should follow similar paths. I was particularly inspired … Continue reading →

Posted in Change, General, Leadership, Strategy | Tagged artificial intelligence, body, body-mind, brain, Charles Sanders Peirce, dualism, embodied management, Genghis, GOFAI, integrated reporting, John Dewey, Learning from the Links, Mark Johnson, pragmatic turn, pragmatists, Rodney Brooks, Upton Sinclair, William James | Comments Off on Words are Easy, Numbers can be Faked, Behaviour is Difficult: The Case for Embodied Management ← Older posts Newer posts →