Change by threes
Creating change in any organisation is a huge challenge to the capacity of an organsations leadership. Over many years of assisting in all sorts of projects, I observe it often tends to become overly complicated, perhaps over-intellectualised, so I have a simple 3...
Freedom of whose press?
That democratic cliché "freedom of the press" is a bit misleading, because to be able to exercise it, you needed to own or control the capital equipment and distribution channel to get your message out, so clearly this freedom was limited to a very few. However,...
Loose/tight management
This is a term I commonly use to describe a management style that I believe delivers the best results to any enterprise. In one sense, central management is loose, against a clearly articulated and understood strategic purpose, it allows line management to make...
Geography is dead
Since man sought to organise themselves beyond family groups, geography has been the fundamental organising principal of almost all the institutions created, it was really the only thing that made sense. Everything from businesses to empires and the church(s) were...
Innovation is Organic, not Linear
Innovation is an organic process, and it seems that only with the benefit of hindsight, when the papers are written, does the rationalization of errors, dead-ends, side-tracks, and jumping on the spot, occur to make it seem linear. The best we can do is create the...
Selling an idea internally
Trying to get stakeholder buy-in for an idea that breaks the mould is very hard in most organisations as it challenges the dominating logic of the organisation, what has succeeded in the past, and made it what it is today. This process can be helped by breaking the...
Conflict within a group Vs conflict between groups
Somehow, there is an evolutionally phenomenon at work that kicks in when a group gets larger than 150-200, the number that social research has repeatedly identified as the number of people that any individual can have a relationship with, first postulated by...
Leaders who lead
The word "leader" can have a range of meanings depending on the context. It can mean someone who holds a position of power, and it just defines the position. It can also describe someone who inspires, who points the way, who commands loyalty without asking for...
SME shock absorbers
All businesses are conflicted, small ones more obviously than larger ones. On one hand, the immediate urgency to do whatever necessary to generate the cash to pay the bills, and on the other, the necessity to build capability, relationships, and definitive market...
“Opt in” marketing
Social media, as I keep saying, has changed the rules completely. In the pre-digital days of mass marketing, the consumer simply ignored most of the stuff thrown at them, and there was no genuinely effective mechanism to measure the waste. Now, using the tools of...