Paul Taylor

  • The Case For An Organisational ‘Day Of Silence’

    On Wednesday 22nd March I was back in lockdown, confined to a hotel room for 24 hours. Don’t feel sorry for me though, I was in Bali, Indonesia. On Nyepi day , which is New Year’s day in the Balinese Saka Calendar, the island turns off all lights and sounds, stops traffic, reflects and meditates.…

    Paul Taylor

  • Understanding The System Beats Recruiting People Every Time

    How much better off would we ALL be, if all the resources poured pointlessly into chasing talent were instead poured into understanding systems, and systems thinking? The Quintessential Group This week I got the opportunity to speak at the prestigious Archbishop’s Palace, a place steeped in history and first mentioned in the Domesday Book nearly…

    Paul Taylor

  • If A Third Of What We Do Is Waste – Why Can’t We See It?

    How do we create an environment where saying something is a waste of time is a good thing? Andy Tabberer There’s a fairly repeatable pattern in the behaviour of CEOs when they near retirement or leave the workforce entirely. They will often become more outspoken about the failings of the system they were part of.…

    Paul Taylor

  • Smaller, Flatter, Faster. Is The Two Pizza Team Finally Going Mainstream?

    This weeks post looks at the two pizza team which was popularised by Jeff Bezos. In the early days of Amazon he instituted a rule that every internal team should be small enough that it could be fed with two pizzas. The goal was, like almost everything Amazon does, focused on two aims: efficiency and…

    Paul Taylor

  • Do You Really Know What Is Going On In Your Organisation?

    We are at an inflection point: When it comes to workplace culture, there is a large gap between what leaders think is going on and what employees say is happening on the ground. The Hidden Value Of Culture Makers According to the latest Accenture report – two thirds of leaders feel they create empowering environments—in…

    Paul Taylor

  • The Way We Work Isn’t Working

    The office, after management, is arguably the biggest inefficiency tax that organisations layer over themselves. They cost huge amounts to procure and maintain, they become an all too convenient base for meetings (another inefficiency tax), and they set a precedent for the expected hours that people are meant to work. Offices promote lengthy commuting which…

    Paul Taylor

  • How Technology Can Increase Collaboration And Build Trust

    This post is an shortened version of a plenary talk delivered in Cardiff for the Wales Audit Office  Depending on your age it’s likely that the two things you were not taught in school were: a) how to collaborate effectively and b) how to use technology to connect and share with others And yet these…

    Paul Taylor

  • Why Do We Hate Our Offices?

    If you are working in an office today you will be interrupted – or you will interrupt yourself – every 3 minutes. And what’s worse is it will take most of us up to 23 minutes to recover from that distraction. If your boss lets you, go home. Walking out the office door is likely to be…

    Paul Taylor

  • Why We Are So Bad At Defining Problems

    If I had an hour to solve a problem I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions. – Albert Einstein I don’t know whether Einstein ever used those words. It may be just like the Henry Ford “Faster Horses” quote – something perfectly phrased and also perfectly true that…

    Paul Taylor

  • What We Can Learn From The Oldest Companies in The World

    Shigemitsu Kongo, a Japanese Buddhist temple builder, formed his construction company Kongo Gumi in in 578 AD. His company built relationships with their customers that lasted for 1,400 years, surviving through many wars and natural disasters,  just like their temples. It wasn’t technology that nearly killed the company, but cashflow. The oldest company in the world…

    Paul Taylor

  • How Good Company Culture Can Go Bad

    Here’s a sentence I never thought I’d write. One of the best hours I spent this week was with our Governance, Risk and Assurance Team. There – I said it. Joking aside, the relationship between governance and innovation is an important one.  As I wrote in my last post – for an organisation to support innovation…

    Paul Taylor

  • Creating The Right Culture For Innovation and Change

    I’m not sure I buy into the concept of organisations having a culture of innovation. After all, innovation is a process consisting of four things: Having an idea that solves a problem Doing something with that idea Proving that it delivers new value for people Translating it into reality and making it part of the…

    Paul Taylor

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