What the world needs now…

…is love sweet love.  As Burt Bacharach and Hal David said, that’s the only thing that there’s just too little of. I shall resist reminding you of the many horrible and ugly things happening in the world.  I shall refrain from listing the many many incidents of casual interpersonal violence that occur all too often…

Where is the love?

In “On the Waterfront”, Eve Marie Saint’s character, Edie, is on a date with Marlon Brandon’s character Terry, and as they sit and talk and get to know a little about each other, she enquires about his situation in life.  He’s a tough, street-hardened fighter, raised in a boys’ home after his father got bumped…

What does it take for us to work as a team?

Copernicus has been name-checked in a fair few articles I’ve read lately.  Good thing too.  Working with a client a couple years ago, we illustrated the concept of “shifting consciousness” with a story about Copernicus, our point being that to get to “WE”, to really get to WE, a shift in consciousness is required.  We…

Counter-acting the Stockholm Syndrome

Stockholm Syndrome is a psychological phenomenon in which hostages display empathy and sympathy for their captors, often developing positive feelings towards them and defending them. I’m often fascinated by how people, when they walk through the door of their workplaces, adopt behaviours akin to the symptoms of Stockholm Syndrome.  Despite knowing in our hearts and…

How can we create new patterns of inter-relating at work?

I have been interested in the furore that has followed Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer banning workers from working from home.  I’ve also read that Hubert Joly, the new chief at struggling retailer Best Buy has also just scrapped their Results Only Work Environment (ROWE) for their corporate employees.  Corporate staff who, until now, have been…

Manage the system, not silos

I’ve heard that if you cut a hologram into pieces, each piece contains all the information of the whole.  I’ve never tried it, but I like the idea that each part is a microcosm of the whole thing. In working with three senior teams in three entirely different sectors over the past month, I’ve heard…

Do we really need performance management?

Individual performance management is rubbish.  Not only that, it’s patronising and disabling.  I’ve said it before.  When people aren’t performing, it’s extremely probable that it’s not a behavioural problem; it’s the system.  It’s not that performance management as a concept has been sullied because it’s been ineptly carried out.  It’s just that it’s pointless and…

I am the Walrus

Know how you have an experience and some song lyrics pop into your head that seem to have been written especially for it?  “Expert textpert, choking smoker, don’t you think the joker laughs at you?”  Parallel process.  Happens to me all the time when I’m working.  I suddenly notice that what the client is doing,…

A Matter of Life and Death

Why would the whole of the Universe be a complex, self-organising and interdependent system, and a business be a top-down, controlled machine?  Why would the entire Universe be subject to the laws of Nature, and business, not?  It’s almost as some businesses they think they exist in some bubble, where the laws of nature are…

How do we get to WE?

There is something in the air.  Call it my natural human tendency to find patterns in things, but two recent conversations with two different clients in two different cities have reminded me of two other completely different clients in two completely different countries.  The parallels are striking.  It could be my bias towards systems thinking,…