Tag Archives: engineering

The Engineer and The Gardener: the Central Tension in 21st Century Management

“Warm hearts allied with cool heads seek a middle way between the extremes of abstract theory and personal impulse”                                         Stephen Toulmin, … Continue reading

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Changing Our Models of Change: Nothing Lasts Unless It Is Incessantly Renewed”

In a blog last year, Matthew Taylor, Chief Executive of the Royal Society of the Arts wrote “Ideas about social and economic reform are only as useful as the model of change that goes with them.” I agree completely. We … Continue reading

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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

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Organic and Mechanical Approaches to Complex Systems

The last week a blog I wrote for the Harvard Business Review and the Drucker Forum was published on the HBR site. It brought together a number of issues that I have been talking about in the past few months … Continue reading

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Is Storytelling a Strategy or a Competency?

Several weeks ago a blog appeared on the Harvard Business Review site entitled “Good Companies are Storytellers. Great Companies Are Storydoers.” In it its author, Ty Montague, outlined the characteristics of a storydoing company: 1. They have a story 2. … Continue reading

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