Reflections on business and life
Blogs touching on the fundamentals of culture, speccifically organisaitonal culture
Systems thinking is a discipline for seeing wholes. It is a framework for seeing interrelationships rather than things, for seeing ‘patterns of change’ rather than static ‘snapshots.’ Peter Senge[i] It is often said that real understanding of a topic only … Continued
Understanding where your workplace culture really comes from Organisational culture is one of those terms everyone uses, and no one defines quite the same way. At its simplest it is just “the way we do things around here.” That short … Continued
Total Quality Management, Business Process Re-engineering, and Learning Organisation. Most organisations facing problems reach for an intervention. Fewer ask which kind of intervention the situation demands. Even fewer have a conceptual framework that would allow them to answer that question. The three … Continued
What Termites Reveal About the Social Contract of Culture A worker termite spends its entire life building a structure it will never own. It defends offspring it did not produce and, in most species, will never produce any of its … Continued
Departmental or Strategic Organisation Development. Introduction Organisation Development (OD) has, since its formalisation in the mid-twentieth century, carried a persistent ambiguity of scope. In its most familiar guise, OD is a practice — a set of planned, human-focused interventions (team-building, … Continued
Why Do Organisations Always End Up Looking the Same? Deep down, are they different? 1. The Central Puzzle: Despite the enormous differences between organisations in what they do, where they operate, and when they came into existence, they tend to fall … Continued
Strategic planning is too often reduced to an exercise: apply a framework, fill in a template, produce a document. There are many books and articles on strategy, strategic management, tools, and techniques to use and many more books on strategic … Continued
Socrates, Critical Thinking, and AI Living with questions in a time of fake news New Developments This topic touches every organisation, every leader, and every individual navigating the modern world. It provides a conceptual foundation that underpins effective functioning across … Continued
How the CEO Became an “Entrepreneur” and Why It Matters to the Rest of the Organisation Introduction Walk into any airport bookshop, and you will find a shelf of business memoirs whose titles, taken together, describe a particular self-image: the … Continued
Laws of Nature, Their Relevance to People, Organisations, Systems, and Organisation Development. In this reflection, we focus on a few laws of nature from the exact sciences. Some of these will surface again in later reflections. The application of natural … Continued
Levels of Considerations in Strategic Planning Introduction There is a model developed by mathematician Eduard Lucas with many names but often called the Tower of Hanoi. The model comprises three pegs and several discs of varying sizes, stacked in order … Continued
Change, Strategy, Culture, and the Change Agent It has become a cliché to speak of the pace and degree of change in the 21st century – yet the observation is ancient. The philosopher Heraclitus (c. 540–480 BC) held that “on those … Continued
