Whitepapers

It is no surprise to see hard-working, collaborative individuals with great social skills emerging as potential leaders and being nominated for talent development programmes. In fact, it makes a welcome change to some of the overly ambitious, pushy individuals who feel they deserve a space at the top table but do not always demonstrate the capabilities to be effective. So why is it that many of…

Is there someone on your team who seems unusually productive? Someone who gets a huge amount done — without working longer hours? Super-productive people are in every industry. The most productive software developers write nine times more usable code per day than the average developer, according to research by Michael Mankins. He also found that the best fish butcher at Le Bernardin…

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.…