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Net Zero and The Law of Horse Manure
Catastrophic predictions that spell dark days for humanity are nothing new. The Times predicted in 1894 that in 50 years time, every street in London would be buried under nine feet of horse manure. It was the crisis of all crises. There was, to be fair, some evidence for this. As urban populations rapidly increased… Read more
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The Gravitational Pull Of Business As Usual
The interior secrets of black holes are guarded by a one-way light-trapping boundary called the event horizon. This horizon is the point, according to NASA, that the gravitational influence of the black hole becomes so intense that not even light is fast enough to escape it. A very different horizon exists in many organisations, except… Read more
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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 can get rejected. It’s not personal. It’s just an automatic survival mechanism. Purposeful thinking –… Read more
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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 or status. Earn more, consume more, and you’ll be happy. The legacy of this is… Read more
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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 York housewife named Jean Nidetch began a weekly meeting with friends at her home to… Read more
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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 diametrically opposed to what they need – and want is often more of a powerful… Read more
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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, right now that would be the worst thing we could do. Collaboration can kill creativity.… Read more
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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 number of things in common: People were unclear why a programme was needed in the… Read more
Paul Taylor 