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Category Archives: Change

The Re-Enchantment of Management and The Renewal of Capitalism

Posted on May 8, 2012 by David

Recently the Harvard Business Review, McKinsey & Company and the Management Innovation eXchange (MIX) conducted a series of three competitions on “Reinventing Management”. The first was the The Management 2.0 Challenge, which characterized the existing version of management as version … Continue reading →

Posted in Change, General, Leadership, Strategy | Tagged Anglo-Saxon capitalism, disenchantment, ends, financialization, Harvard Business Review, human potential, management academy, McKinsey, means, mission, MIX, nurture, positivism, purpose, re-enchantment, release, renewal | Comments Off

The Poverty of Economics: Capitalism Is Not Just About Competition

Posted on May 1, 2012 by David

Last week David Brooks wrote a column titled “The Creative Monopoly” (New York Times, April 24). In it he told a story about Peter Thiel, the entrepreneur who founded PayPal and the course he is now teaching about entrepreneurial startups … Continue reading →

Posted in Change, General | Tagged Anglo-Saxon capitalism, creative monopoly, David Brooks, ecological narrative, Fannie Mae, IMF, market power, neoclassical economics, niche, perfect competition, Peter Thiel, regulator capture, Simon Johnson | Comments Off

Breaking the Cake of Custom: A Cavalry Charge with Fresh Horses

Posted on April 24, 2012 by David

Organizations have to do two things to survive in a sustainable fashion: Conserve their core business Innovate to change their business The current term for this ability of organizations to both “exploit” and “explore” is “ambidexterity”, but it has long … Continue reading →

Posted in Change | Tagged Alfred North Whitehead, cake of custom, conservation, Dan Señor, habit, innovation, Israel, Mormon, noveltyPlato, Peter Drucker, progress.order, Saul Singer, think and act, Walter Bagehot | Comments Off

Management Without Principles

Posted on April 10, 2012 by David

Management “principles” have been a prominent feature of the field ever since the 1950s, when a concerted attempt was made to put management on the path to becoming a social science. With economics as their guide and physics as the … Continue reading →

Posted in Change, General | Tagged Cartesian mind, complex systems, context, contextual intelligence, ecological rationality, economics, history matters, innovation skills, management principles, Master's golf, meaning, POSDCORB, The Innovator's DNA | 1 Comment

Measuring Buzz: Hunting Dynamics in the 21st Century

Posted on April 6, 2012 by David

Every manager knows that the “buzz” on a team is an important indicator of their likely success. You can poke your head into a meeting room and, without hearing a word of what is being said, get an instant impression … Continue reading →

Posted in Change, General | Tagged body language, buzz, communication media, engagement, exploration, fission-fusion, hunter-gatherer, hunters and herders, hunting dynamics, narrative | Comments Off

Bad Apples or Bad Barrels? An ecological perspective on ethics in management

Posted on March 30, 2012 by David

In my last two blogs I have suggested that many of our institutions have lost their sense of purpose, as their means to success have steadily become ends-in-themselves. This loss of purpose has been accompanied by a steady increase in … Continue reading →

Posted in Change, General | Tagged bad apples, Douglas McGregor, ecological rationality, evildoers, figure and ground, George W. Bush, management ethics, MBA Oath, Mr. Spock, rational model, Theory X | Comments Off

When Means Become Ends: Part II – the unintended consequences of outsourcing

Posted on March 27, 2012 by David

My last blog suggested that many North American institutions have steadily lost their sense of purpose, as means have become ends-in-themselves. This weekend’s New York Times offered some more interesting examples of the many different ways in which the process works and … Continue reading →

Posted in Change, General | Tagged institutional purpose, means and ends, outsourcing, privatization, Republican Party | Comments Off

When Means Become Ends: Have our institutions lost their sense of purpose?

Posted on March 23, 2012 by David

Forty years ago going to business school in the Western World, with a view to becoming a manager, was seen as an honorable endeavor. Back then we believed that management was a calling; a practice that had the potential to become … Continue reading →

Posted in Change, General | Tagged business schools, conflict of interest, ecological mental model, Friedrich Hayek, incentives, markets, means and ends, measurement, muppets, purpose, shareholder value model | Comments Off

The Ecocycle: A Mental Model for Understanding Complex Systems

Posted on March 20, 2012 by David

I found this evocative image a short time ago. It captures the intention and spirit of the book admirably: three dragons – I have named them Passion, Reason and Power – scramble on a Moebius strip in a never-ending three-cornered … Continue reading →

Posted in Change, General, Leadership, Strategy | Tagged adaptive cycle, anticipation, Chapter 11, complex systems, creative leadership, destruction, ecocycle, ecosystem, General Motors, infinity symbol, Kodak, logic, mental model, Moebius strip, moment of Now, power, prediction, Rochester, social traps, strategic management, sustainability, sweet zone, trust | 2 Comments

Contextual Intelligence: A String in the Labyrinth

Posted on March 15, 2012 by David

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 →