Tag Archives: identity

BREXIT: A Study in Complexity

British politics is in a real mess. Mired in the Brexit debate, its current predicament is best captured in the poetry of the Victorian writer Matthew Arnold; “Wandering between two worlds, the one dead, the other powerless to be born.” … Continue reading →

Posted in Change, General, Leadership | Tagged Brexit, change, community, complex adaptive systems, complex systems, creativity, David Cameron, ecocycle, ecological perspective, identity, Jeremy Corbyn, Labour, leadership, Matthew Arnold, Nigel Farage, Theresa May, Tory, UKIP, utility | Comments Off on BREXIT: A Study in Complexity

Lead 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 →

Posted in Change, General, Leadership | Tagged adaptive, agile, Cartesian mindset, CEO Theory of Mind, Champy, complex systems, Davenport, design thinking, ecological perspective, identity, leadership, management fads, means and ends, Michael Hammer, social movement | Comments Off on Lead Like a Gardener! – Agile and Design Thinking Will Become Management Fads Unless We Expand Our Concept of Management

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 →

Posted in Change, General | Tagged AI, analysis, big data, calculation, Cartesian, economists, Edmund Burke, Enlightenment, existential, French Revolution, Hamilton, identity, instrumental, Isaiah Berlin, Jefferson, Mercier, political judgement, pragmatism, rationality, re-engineering, reason, Ronald Reagan, Sperber, Steven Pinker, Thomas Paine, utility, West Point | Comments Off on Management Needs to Return to Reason

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 →

Posted in Change, General, Leadership | Tagged Adler, Clayton Christensen, community, complex systems, Drucker, Frankl, Freud, identity, meaning, means and ends, pleasure, power, prosperity, purpose, utility | Comments Off on Management: a Noble Practice

Don’t Throw the Past Away

The late Kenneth Boulding, environmental advisor to JFK and one of my favourite economists, once said that “Anyone who believes in indefinite growth in anything physical, on a physically finite planet, is either mad – or an economist.” I used … Continue reading →

Posted in Change, General | Tagged ancestor, ecocycle, Erik Erikson, generation gap, identity, Kamloops, Kenneth Boulding, narrative, Northrop Frye, psychosocial development, retirement, Rotary, sustainability, William Blake | Comments Off on Don’t Throw the Past Away

Decommoditize Yourself! – Coating Products in Meaning

Last week I travelled to Phoenix, Arizona to attend the annual meeting of Electro-Federation Canada and to deliver the opening keynote address. The association works with the electrical, consumer electronics and telecommunications industries and its membership consists of manufacturers and … Continue reading →

Posted in Change, General, Leadership, Strategy | Tagged A.G. Lafely, Anglo-Saxon capitalism, change, commoditization, community, context, cult, David Brooks, Dom Perignon, ecological perspective, ecosystem, Electro-Federation Canada, Ferrari, identity, meaning, narrative, niche, P&G, product life cycle | 1 Comment

“Go Ahead: Make Our Day” – What Clint Eastwood Might Have Said

The unintended highlight of the Republican National Convention (RNC) last week was Clint Eastwood’s rambling address on Thursday that consumed 13 minutes of precious prime time, delaying Mitt Romney’s acceptance speech. Scheduled for only five minutes in the rigidly scripted … Continue reading →

Posted in Change, General, Leadership | Tagged Anglo-Saxon capitalism, apathy, Barack Obama, challenge, change, chaos, Clint Eastwood, communities of capitalists, community, cowboy, Democratic National Convention, despair, entertainment, government service, gunslinger, heart, hope, how, identity, individual, meaning, mission, Mitt Romney, narrative, narrative centre of gravity, network, obstacles, passion, political parties, purpose, Republican National Convention, stories, support, tension, trade-off, unemployed, values, what, who, why | 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