Reflections on business and life
Blogs touching on systems, systems thinking and their relevance in business
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
