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…

In transition

The cosmos is a complex, and sometimes confusing, place. Every three or four months, the planet Mercury goes retrograde.  What this means is that if you track its movement in the sky, it will appear to move backwards for about 3 weeks and then it continues its forward course.  In ancient Greece, the planets used…

Leadership and complexity

If you have ever been for an eye test, you will know that the optician will have you look through a contraption with lots of lenses, and then proceed to add and take away lenses until your vision can see the letters on the chart precisely.  They will spend time experimenting with the lenses and…

Transcendent leadership

Reading the London #riotcleanup Twitter stream last week was fascinating.  Taken in isolation and looked at one-dimensionally, one might consider a community that mobilises itself to clean up after riots to be a positive phenomenon.  The range of views on the Twitter feed does not bear this out however.   Some views extend to calling…

>Not everything that counts can be counted

> We are in the process of a change, from what we know well, to something new and unknown; it’s a change in the paradigm we live in.  In other words, it’s BIG.  The time of transition always feels unstable, chaotic, because that’s exactly what it is.  We know the old and we keep getting dragged…

What wet monkeys can teach us about culture shift

Inspired by a really interesting conversation with a friend, I’m pondering on what creates a cultural shift in an organisation.   While a culture shift will be catalysed by and affected by many, many factors, the impact of values on such a shift is giving me pause for thought. To me, the word ‘culture’ very…