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Category Archives: Leadership

Recipe for Ruin: Nothing Lasts Unless It Is Incessantly Renewed

Posted on July 31, 2012 by David

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

In Praise of Ecological Rationality: The Return of Practical Wisdom to Management

Posted on June 26, 2012 by David

This is the title of the article of mine published last week by the European Financial Review. It begins like this: Just over fifty years ago in America a concerted attempt was made to professionalize the field of management and … Continue reading →

Posted in General, Leadership | Tagged ba, both...and, ecocycle, ecological rationality, either/or, European Financial Review, existentialist, functional disciplines, functions, Haridomos Tsoukas, hermeneutist, Immanuel Kant, John Dewey, Jorgen Sandberg, Martin Heidegger, means and ends, phenomenologist, practical rationality, practical wisdom, Rene Descartes, Richard Feynman, rigor and relevance, scientifi rationality, theory and practice, William James, Yogi Berra | Comments Off

Obama and Romney: Prisoners of the System?

Posted on June 19, 2012 by David

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

The Spirit of Capitalism: the Quakers and the First Industrial Revolution

Posted on May 29, 2012 by David

The ecological model in The New Ecology of Leadership shows enterprises as being conceived in passion and born in communities of trust and practice. My insights into this dynamic were first guided by my discovery of the Society of Friends, … Continue reading →

Posted in Change, General, Leadership, Strategy | Tagged Adam Smith, Anglican Church, Anglo-Saxon capitalism, Barclays Bank, Book of John, Book of Matthew, Catholic Church, charcoal, Christian calling, Coalbrookdale, coke, community, complex systems, engines, English Civil War, English Nonconformists, First Industrial Revolution, George Fox, ideology of markets, iron, Iron Bridge, Lloyds Bank, market price, Max Weber, means and ends, pots, pumps, Quakers, Robert Barclay, Royal Navy, Sermon on the Mount, Shropshire, skillets, Society of Friends, sociology of virtue, spirit of capitalism, The Wealth of Nations, Theory of Moral Sentiments, William Penn | Comments Off

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 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

Halftime in America: The power of story

Posted on February 23, 2012 by David

A day or so ago on the Harvard Business Review Readers discussion group the topic was posted: What did you learn from the best Super Bowl ad? The Super Bowl is a huge marketing showcase… of which a few commercials stood … Continue reading →

Posted in Change, Leadership | Tagged analogy, Clint Eastwood, community, desire, Halftime in America, narrative, narrative truth, seamless success, shareholder value, story-telling mammals, Super Bowl, trouble | Comments Off

Command and Collaborate

Posted on February 14, 2012 by David

In a recent HBR blog, INSEAD Professor Herminia Ibarra reported from the World Economic Forum in Davos. The theme of the meeting was “The Great Transformation: Shaping New Models”. As far as leadership was concerned, she wrote that the emerging … Continue reading →