Parkinson’s Curse
I’ve always been fascinated by
Waiting for Change
One of the toughest challenges for any leader is managing change. It seems that the skills required, and the stress suffered, are the same whether you’re implementing a new form, or leading a transformational restructuring. Dozens of books have been written about change management – and, I’m sure, thousands of blog posts. In fact, I [...]
Lay of the Land
Travelling without a map can be risky business. Intuition and luck will only get you so far. You might get to your destination or you might just go around in circles. It’s no different in leadership where the lack of a roadmap – vision, strategy and goals – can lead to a somewhat meandering journey. [...]
Feel the Burn
The burning platform metaphor is often used to make a compelling case for change. The argument is that resistance to change is not an option and change must be implemented urgently to ensure the very survival of the organization. There are a a lot of problems with the burning platform. First and foremost, it’s overused and [...]
Buying Change
The Beatles wrote that you can’t buy love. But when will government learn you can’t buy change either? Government has a lot of tools at its disposal to effect change. It can use law, policy and influence. But most of the time it uses money. Cold hard cash to buy change. Over and over again, [...]
Gilligan Complex
Actor Bob Denver will always be remembered for his role as the clueless first mate Gilligan on the 1960’s sitcom Gilligan’s Island. And that’s about it. Denver acted in other television roles but generally spent the rest of his career being identified as for his role as Gilligan. Bob Denver was typecast. He was, in [...]
Expert Syndrome
It’s generally held that real leadership is about collaboration. We are encouraged to work together with colleagues, staff and partners to achieve shared goals. As Stephen Covey calls it, we seek to synergize to try and find third alternatives: innovative solutions that we couldn’t have discovered working on the same issue by ourselves. But collaboration, [...]
Courage
Courage is defined as the ability to do something which frightens you, to show bravery and demonstrate strength in the face of pain and grief. But what does it mean when an organizations espouses that one of its guiding values is courage? I am guessing it doesn’t mean that leaders and staff are expected to [...]
Lost in the Cloud
The latest buzzword in business is “the cloud”. Cloud computing is all the rage. We are all encouraged to collaborate in “the cloud”. Apple and Microsoft tout the benefits of their respective clouds. Dropbox and Box now store terabits of people’s data…in the cloud. The cloud is a wonderful innovation that creates a seamless connection [...]
Wisdom Over Hubris
I was having lunch the other day with another 50-something leader commiserating about career prospects and our changing workplaces. We are both senior level leaders – one in the private sector and the other in the public sector. More and more, we concluded, the freshly minted MBAs are making their inroads into our respective organizations. [...]