Responsible and responsive leadership Frans van Houten, the CEO of Philips Electronics, sponsored the signing of a Responsible and Responsive Leadership compact at this year’s World Economic Forum. In it, he and other global organisation leaders signed up to taking a long-term value creation approach to corporate strategy that is in keeping with the sustainabilityRead more
Genetic engineering for teams The enduring image from the recent London Marathon of one runner sacrificing his own time (and race) to help another exhausted and collapsing competitor make it to the finish reminded me of the critical quality in teams…the desire to see others flourish as much as we desire it for ourselves. InRead more
Being our own mosquito The most effective consultants dive deep and persist, searching for the real need rather than the first thing they come across. Getting the right diagnosis is more than half the battle. While this suggests a mosquito-like tenacity if you had a challenging and seemingly intractable problem wouldn’t you welcome the insistentRead more
Connecting with doing the right thing Working with a group of young managers over the past few days we were exploring, among other things, the difference between leadership and management. It gave us the opportunity to explore the distinction that leaders ‘do the right thing’ while ‘managers do things right’ (thanks to Peter Drucker). It’sRead more
The courage to change course British PM Theresa May’s calling, last week, of the snap election she’d ruled out several months ago was always going to attract bucket loads of U-turn type criticism from opposition parties and their MPs plus the left-leaning media. Whatever her motives, and whether we need another vote in the UKRead more
Letting go to grow Over the past couple of days I have been thinking a lot about letting go in the context of development. For the most part when we think about our development as leaders we focus heavily on the things that we need to acquire/get better at in order to have more impact.Read more
Getting our leadership fit for the future We are said to be at the beginning of a fourth Industrial Revolution prompted by technological advance that gains in acceleration with each new development. Of course no one knows how this will turn out but we can reasonably foresee a very different workplace and very different jobsRead more
Getting to the heart of what’s real Have you ever thought about what’s ‘real’? Defining our personal reality always seems such an important part of the human condition – that point of groundedness or ‘stability’ from which we can go forward and live our lives. And yet at this time in human evolution with soRead more