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Management Rewired: Why Feedback Doesn’t Work and Other Surprising Lessons from the Latest Brain Science

Posted on September 5, 2012 by David

By Charles S. Jacobs
Portfolio, 2009, 216 pages

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Why Management by Objectives Fails (and so may OKR)

Posted on November 15, 2021 by David

With the annual Drucker Forum now taking place in Vienna it’s timely to reflect on Management by Objectives (MBO), the most enduring and popular of the ideas that Peter Drucker championed. MBO was not original to Drucker. He probably owed … Continue reading →

Posted in General, Leadership | Tagged Gestalt, management by objectives, Mary Parker Follett, objectives and key results, Peter Drucker, Wilhelm von Humboldt | Comments Off

Renewing the American Republic: The Ecodynamics of Donald Trump Part II

Posted on November 11, 2016 by David

In the early hours of Wednesday November 9 2016 I was as bemused as everyone else. Donald Trump had won the presidential election and would be the 45th President of the United States. The last polls I saw had given … Continue reading →

Posted in Change, Leadership, Strategy | Tagged Anglo-Saxon capitalism, capitalism, change, community, complex systems, democracy, Donald Trump, ecocycle, ecological perspective, Hillary Clinton, Lawrence Lessig, lobbyists, Mancur Olson, narrative, NRA, power trap | Comments Off

Bloody Ships – Bloody Systems: A Managerial Reflection on the Centenary of the Battle of Jutland

Posted on May 24, 2016 by David

“There seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today…” remarked Vice Admiral David Beatty to his Flag Captain. Beatty was commander of the Battle Cruiser Fleet at Jutland, and his cool comment belied the scale of the catastrophe. … Continue reading →

Posted in Change, General | Tagged battle-cruiser, Bismarck, complex systems, context, David Beatty, HMS Hood, HMS Lion, Horace Hood, Indefatigable, innovation, Invincible, Jutland, Nelson, Queen Mary, Trafalgar | Comments Off

Cultivating Organizations – Background to The New Ecology of Leadership

Posted on April 26, 2016 by David

I am now publishing my blogs both here and on LinkedIn. In this case this article is already on the site (in Latest News About the Book), so just the link is here. It’s an article I wrote last year for … Continue reading →

Posted in Change, General | Tagged change, complex systems, ecocycle, ecological perspective, means and ends, The New Ecology of Leadership | Comments Off

The Ecology of Innovation

Posted on December 2, 2014 by David

A few weeks ago I delivered a keynote presentation at the Innovation Congress in Villach Austria. I spoke for about 30 minutes on the topic of The Ecology of Innovation to a group of over 600 participants. I began by … Continue reading →

Posted in Change, General, Leadership | Tagged body language, ecological perspective, ecology of innovation, ecosystem, enterprise, exploitation, exploration, Innovation Congress, KPI, MIT, Sandy Pentland, Social Physics, steering, sweet zone, systems perspective, villach | Comments Off

Exploring Leadership Using Metaphors

Posted on April 1, 2014 by David

Last week I spent a day-and-a-half with a group of senior managers from a large global company discussing leadership. The company faces all the challenges one might expect it to face – globalization, digitization, cross-cultural difficulties and so on in … Continue reading →

Posted in Change, General, Leadership, Strategy | Tagged budget, CCL, Chuck Palus, David Horth, ecological perspective, financial forecasting, Leadership Metaphor Explorer, mental model, metaphor, performance management, The New Ecology of Leadership, Visual Explorer, VUCA | Comments Off

The 3 “Rs” of Management: Rigour, Relevance and Rationality

Posted on January 21, 2014 by David

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

Mission Command: An Elusive Philosophy Whose Time Has Come

Posted on December 3, 2013 by David

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 →