Tag Archives: ecological perspective

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Is “Shareholder Value” a Myth or a Tool for Corporate Euthanasia?

I have been reading Lynn Stout’s The Shareholder Value Myth: How Putting Shareholders First Harms Investors, Corporations and The Public. It is a short, highly readable book, written with the objective of demolishing what Professor Stout calls the “shareholder value … Continue reading →

Posted in Change, General, Leadership | Tagged bankruptcy, boards, corporate law, directors, Dodge v. Ford, ecological perspective, innovation, liquidation, Lynn Stout, Mitt Romney, principal-agent, purpose, shareholder value model | 2 Comments

Recipe for Ruin: Nothing Lasts Unless It Is Incessantly Renewed

Over the weekend a comment on a management blog referred to a piece by management writer Steve Denning in Forbes magazine. Entitled “The Key Missing Ingredient in Leadership Today”, it argued that real leadership is all about transforming systems, not … Continue reading →

Posted in Change, General, Leadership | Tagged Apocalypse Now, bureaucracy, coercive bureaucracy, complex systems, context, creativity, crisis, Denning, Deresiewicz, destruction, discipline, ecological perspective, enabling bureaucracy, Forbes, Francis Ford Coppola, freedom, Heart of Darkness, hierarchy, identity, innovation, Joseph Conrad, know-how, know-what, means and ends, modular, narrative, power, renewal, ruin, Toyota Production System, West Point | Comments Off on Recipe for Ruin: Nothing Lasts Unless It Is Incessantly Renewed

Renewal in the West: Nature Bats Last

This year the annual fire season has come early to the Western regions of North America. In the southern mountains it has been prompted by a reduced snowpack, low rainfalls, blistering heat and low humidity. In the north, where the … Continue reading →

Posted in Change, General | Tagged California wildfire, Cedar Fire, chaparral, destruction, ecocycle, ecological perspective, fire, fire season 2012, fire-dependent, human community, lodgepole pine, mountain pine beetle, nature bats last, San Diego, Santa Ana wind, serotiny, Western forest | Comments Off on Renewal in the West: Nature Bats Last

Obama and Romney: Prisoners of the System?

I spent Thursday and Friday of last week at a conference in Las Vegas where I was speaking. The meeting was put on by the Applied Finance Group (AFG), a financial consulting company who create sophisticated corporate valuation models for … Continue reading →

Posted in Change, General, Leadership | Tagged addiction, Barack Obama, Clinton incrementalism, Congress, corruption, creative destruction, dependency, East Coker, ecological perspective, economic rents, Facebook, flat tax, gift economy, House of Representatives, Instagram, Lawrence Lessig, Milton Friedman, Mitt Romney, Republic Lost, Ronald Reagan, rootstriker, Senate, social traps, sunset clause, The New Ecology of Leadership, Thoreau, TS Eliot | Comments Off on Obama and Romney: Prisoners of the System?

Bain or Bane? Private-Equity and Creative Destruction

With Mitt Romney now the inevitable Republican Presidential candidate, renewed attention is being focused on his incredibly lucrative years running Bain Capital. In that private-equity firm he and his colleagues played key roles, mostly as the turnaround managers of mature … Continue reading →

Posted in Change, General | Tagged American economy, Anglo-Saxon capitalism, Bain, complex systems, creative destruction, ecological perspective, forest renewal, incentives, innovation, Mitt Romney, neoclassical economics, Obama, predator, private-equity, scavenger, shareholders, tax policy, The Economist, venture capital | Comments Off on Bain or Bane? Private-Equity and Creative Destruction

Contextual Intelligence: A String in the Labyrinth

This week’s interim blog marks the posting of the Introduction to The New Ecology of Leadership as an excerpt.  What follows below is an extract from the introduction that identifies seven rewards for reading the book: Changing a legacy computing system … Continue reading →

Posted in Change | Tagged architecture of choice, change, context, contextual intelligence, design of choice, ecological perspective, emotion and power, mental model, stability and change, stories, sweet zone | Comments Off on Contextual Intelligence: A String in the Labyrinth Newer posts →