Paul Taylor
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Why Small Teams Win
In the early days of Amazon, Jeff Bezos came up with a rule: every team should be small enough that it could be fed with two pizzas. The ‘Two Pizza Rule’ signalled that Bezos didn’t want more talking, more line reports… Continue reading
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Failure: We Need To Move From Slow And Stupid To Fast And Intelligent
In the history of pointless technology, it takes a lot to beat the Twitter Peek. Aimed at those interested in Twitter, but who didn’t own a smartphone, it asked customers to spend $100 plus a monthly subscription. With the benefit of hindsight,… Continue reading
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We Need To Be Boringly Reliable and Radically Disruptive – At The Same Time
Our organisations are generally bad at innovation. That’s because they are designed that way. Just as your body is designed to fight a common cold, most of our cultures protect the organisational DNA from any foreign antibodies. Add something new and it… Continue reading
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Reshaping Organisations Around What’s Strong – Not What’s Wrong
“ECONOMICS ARE THE METHOD: THE OBJECT IS TO CHANGE THE SOUL” This (pretty chilling) quote comes from Margaret Thatcher in 1981 – and ushered in an era that promoted the belief that social progress is achieved through the accumulation of wealth… Continue reading
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Avoiding The Yo-Yo Effect of ‘Corporate Change Convulsions’
Speeches you never hear at a corporate conference: “….. Our Transformation Programme is going to be small and imperfect. We are going to do many small things that probably won’t work straight away.’ – Chris Bolton In the early 1960s, a New… Continue reading
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5 Reasons You Need To Question What Customers Are Telling You
Despite little evidence of impact, each year millions of pounds are spent on market research, focus groups, and ‘coproduction’. The danger of listening to customers is you end up focusing on wants not needs. Often what a customer wants is… Continue reading
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Ending The Myth Of Collaboration
The best organisational cultures are tolerant of the loner, the thinker. – John Wade “If I was you,” said a colleague recently “now would be a very good time to involve customers, to get more people involved”. No, I thought,… Continue reading
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The Big Problem With Change Programmes
People don’t resist change, they resist bullshit – Peter Vander Auwera A friend of mine told me last week that their organisation was about to begin its third change management programme in just seven years. Each of the two preceding programmes had a… Continue reading
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Continuous Partial Attention: Designing A Less Distracted Future Of Work
Calm, focused, undistracted, the linear mind is being pushed aside by a new kind of mind that wants and needs to take in and dole out information in short, disjointed, often overlapping bursts—the faster, the better – Nicholas Carr ,… Continue reading
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The Number 1 Priority For Your CEO: Building Trust
Silence is now deeply dangerous—a tax on truth – Richard Edelman Trust is the most valuable commodity in your organisation – although it’s probably not something you talk about often, much less attempt to measure. For the past 16 years,… Continue reading
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If You’re Still Shying Away From Using Technology To Improve Customer Experience – You’re Doomed
You must relentlessly ask: Is this harder for the customer to do? Relentlessly. Because, today, in an increasing number of areas, if it’s not easy-to-use, it’s dead in the water. – Gerry McGovern Re-entry into the world of work after… Continue reading
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Change, Transformation and Complex Problems: My Top 5 Posts of 2017
One of my 2017 resolutions was to blog more consistently. The glory days in terms of the readership and reach of this site peaked in 2014 before a decline in 15/16. The problem was lack of discipline. My blogging lesson… Continue reading
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Why We Need To Learn To Love Project Managers
‘There isn’t a child alive who dreams of being a project manager’ – so said Scott Berkun. He pointed out that project managers can unintentionally reinforce their work as (let’s be honest) dull – by trying to get everyone to pay… Continue reading
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How To Kill Innovation In 10 Easy Steps
Many of our organisations, without realising it, act as inhibitors of innovation. Rules and protocols are put in place — often for very good reasons — that preserve the status quo. Over time, organisations develop a set of social norms… Continue reading
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The Case Against Digital Transformation
Something that’s being sold to you as more convenient may well be a lost social interaction that you’ll never get back – Ben Holliday, Convenience Isn’t Digital Last week a friend of ours told me a story about trying to get some… Continue reading
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How The 9-5 Saps Our Creativity and Harms Our Productivity
From ten to eleven, have breakfast for seven; From eleven to noon, think you’ve come too soon; From twelve to one, think what’s to be done; From one to two, find nothing to do; From two to three, think it… Continue reading
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How To Design For Better Outcomes
Our job is to the mind the gap between the bureaucracy of our systems and the opportunities in our communities – Cormac Russell Sometimes it’s preferable to pull the plug on a service before you see it collapse in front of… Continue reading
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An A-Z of Modern Jargon
Yesterday a colleague who had been faced with a lot of long documents filled with confusing language came out with a great phrase: I didn’t know where to start. So, I didn’t There’s some science to this. Faced with choice… Continue reading
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The Problem With Finding Answers
Don’t Look for a Great Idea. Look for a Good Problem – Greg Satell Yesterday I spent five and half hours in a room with my colleagues Carole and Simon trying to get to the root of a problem. Three… Continue reading
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Why Transformation Fails – And How To Avoid It
The concept that 70% of change and transformation programmes fail emerged in the mid 1990’s. There’s actually little evidence that this is true. The 70% figure seems to have emerged because of a lack of clarity about what success looks… Continue reading
Paul Taylor 