Whitepapers

I am obsessed with the topic of leadership. Organizations need leaders to make key decisions, anticipate and manage changing market trends, and set strategic vision. When competent leadership prevails, people and companies prosper. Bad leadership almost always creates disengaged workers, corporate chicanery, and, eventually, business failure. The problem with most leadership competency models is…

There’s a linguistic theory called the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis that suggests that the language we speak influences the way we think and act. If this is true, then English speakers are notoriously risk averse since the English language is full of sayings about how change is hard: “Better the devil you know.” “A bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.” Out of the frying…

Groups are the default human working unit. For most sorts of jobs, people tend to cooperate and collaborate to get the work done. Even when the job doesn’t need collaboration we still prefer to do it in proximity with others – think brew clubs or cruise ships.   When the job requires cooperation, people are selected into teams primarily on the basis of their functional skills.…

In organisations today, change is constant, rapid and relentless. Learning needs to follow this. Helping individuals and teams in this context is always challenging. Coaching and mentoring have a key role to play, but they are very different even though the terms seem to be used interchangeably. Any sharing of knowledge, experience or advice, in my opinion, is always good as it can accelerate…

When most organizations try to increase their innovation efforts, they always seem to start from the same assumption: “we need more ideas.” They’ll start talking about the need to “think outside the box” or “blue sky” thinking in order to find a few ideas that can turn into viable new products or systems. However, in most organizations, innovation isn’t…