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My Inconvenient Truth – part 1
The naivity of a beginner and the feedback of people around you are the best conditions for innovation to occur. As it turns out, innovation is more about allowing the innate creativity to come out than it is about being a genius. A few months ago I was a co-guest-speaker for a foundation of voluntary […]
Teaching versus Learning
People often ask me why I always refer to ‘Learning’ instead of ‘Training’ when we discuss the Organizational Change Management portfolio. That is because 99% of what ‘Learning’ really is occurs outside of the classroom.
Metaphorically Speaking about SAP
The majority of the projects I am involved in are SAP implementations and most of the times we face the issue of explaining the impact of SAP to the future users, their bosses or their bosses’ boss. I grab the attention fairly easily by saying ‘this is not just a software implementation‘, but as soon […]
Leading@Google: Marshall Goldsmith
This 65 min video is worth watching till the end. You’ll see Marshall Goldsmith in action on an event called Leading@Google. The bottom line of his talk and exercises is: you can’t change the past, so focus on the future and ask: what can I do to be a better manager / parent / son […]
Execution: Organizational Change Management in Practice
In order to be successful, organizational change efforts are not exercises in democracy but rather military deployments. This article builds further on that military metaphor to clarify my point.
One, Two, Three, Seven?!
Every time I introduce something new into my team, my project or the organization I am working for I am reminded of how well I can count. Let me explain: it’s all about buy-in. The below text is quoted from Marshall Goldsmith’s book What Got You Here Won’t Get You There. It describes exactly the […]
The Talking Stick
Last week I was involved in a discussion on a very hot topic in a group of more than 45 people and almost the same diversity of national cultures. About every individual in the room had a firm opinion on the topic and the debate was on: a lot of intelligent people making their point […]
HR Blues
In this article I make an inventory of my observations on HR. I cannot avoid concluding that HR can’t get any worse than it is today.
The Hawthorne Effect
One of the biggest names in the history of management is not the name of a guru but the name of a factory: Hawthorne Works. This is the factory where a series of experiments on factory workers were carried out between 1924 and 1932. There were many types of experiments conducted on the employees, but […]
Pay Attention to your Attention
Sometimes people look at me strange when I mention the importance of psychological safety during organizational change projects. It is a term that I borrowed from the writings of Edgar Schein. Until now I didn’t find a way to explain in plain English what exactly I understand under that term. Strange and expensive words come […]
