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Category Archives: Leadership

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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

Why Isn’t ‘Servant Leadership’ More Prevalent?

This was the question posed recently on the Wisdom Research Network of the University of Chicago by James L. Heskett, Baker Foundation Professor, Emeritus at the Graduate School of Business Administration, Harvard University. He continued: “Servant leadership is an age-old … Continue reading →

Posted in General, Leadership | Tagged Adam Grant, First Industrial Revolution, Give and Take, Herman Miller, James L. Heskett, Lao-Tzu, leadership, Mary Parker Follett, Max de Pree, power-over, power-with, Quakers, Robert Greenleaf, servant-leadership, ServiceMaster, Taoism, wisdom | 5 Comments

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

Pope Francis – the Undercover Boss: “Sell your desk!”

The Undercover Boss is a television franchise that began in the UK in 2009, but has since spread to many other countries. It features the experiences of senior executives working incognito as entry-level employees in their own companies to see … Continue reading →

Posted in Change, Leadership, Strategy | Tagged almoner, careerism, Catholic Church, commodity, community, customers, entrepreneurial spirit, Krajewski, narrative, network, opportunity, Person of the Year, productivity, spirit of capitalism, Time, Vatican | 2 Comments

Drucker’s Intent and Why MBO Fails

Last week I blogged about mission command – auftragstaktik – a philosophy of command-and-collaboration developed by the German General Staff over a period of about eighty years, beginning in the 19th Century. Today its elements can be found in the … Continue reading →

Posted in Change, General, Leadership, Strategy | Tagged Anglo-Saxon capitalism, auftragstaktik, befehlstaktik, Descartes, detailed command, dichotomy, Drucker Forum, Efficiency Movement, existential rationalist, Frederick Taylor, German General Staff, Gestalt, Heidegger, instrumental rationality, intuition, key performance indicators, Kierkegaard, KPI, Lynda Gratton, management by objectives, MBO, mission command, Peter Drucker, philosophy, self-discipline, Soviet Union, Sputnik, tension, wicked problems | 5 Comments

Mission Command: An Elusive Philosophy Whose Time Has Come

This is the third blog in my series of reflections on the 5th Drucker Forum held in Vienna November 14-15, 2013. Among the many things that make this event so stimulating and memorable to attend is the numerous conversations that … Continue reading →

Posted in Change, General, Leadership, Strategy | Tagged auftragstaktik, befehlstaktik, boundaries, command and collaborate, complex systems, Drucker Forum, execution gap, German General Staff, mission command, mission tactics, nested hierarchy, Peter Drucker, Russian dolls, scale, The Practice of Management | 1 Comment

The Map and The Territory: Complexity as Challenge and Opportunity

My blog this week is an extended version of a comment I made a couple of days ago on Adrian Wooldridge’s (the Schumpeter columnist) report on the 5th Drucker Forum in The Economist. It also picks up from last week’s … Continue reading →

Posted in Change, General, Leadership, Strategy | Tagged Christensen, complex systems, complexity, Drucker Forum, formulation, fractal, implementation, job-to-be-done, learning, Mandelbrot, map, Martin Wooldridge, projects, Roger Martin, scale, Schumpeter, strategy, territory, tolerance, Vienna | Comments Off on The Map and The Territory: Complexity as Challenge and Opportunity

You Can’t Herd Cats, But They Will Hunt Together

Over the weekend I got back from Vienna, where I attended the 5th Annual Peter Drucker Global Forum, the theme of which was “Managing Complexity”. Last year I attended my first of these extraordinary conferences on the strength of my … Continue reading →

Posted in Change, General, Leadership, Strategy | Tagged administrative practices, Cartesian cascade, complex systems, global forum, herding, herding cats, hunter-gatherer, hunting, hunting dynamics, Johan Roos, John Hagel, let it happen, make it happen, Peter Drucker, Philip Diab, project management, pull, push, stretch goals, Terry Cooke-Davies | Comments Off on You Can’t Herd Cats, But They Will Hunt Together ← Older posts Newer posts →