With many thanks to my good friend, Alastair Campbell, for an impromptu conversation this week, I wanted to raise an interesting issue. Do the principles of anchoring apply to companies as much as they apply to individuals? To remind you, the concept of anchoring is based on the short circuit in our brain which applies a correlation to unrelated facts / opinions and thereby can make us make some assumptions […]
Many of you will have read Daniel Kahneman’s excellent book, ‘Thinking Fast and Slow’ (attached link for a TED summary), or perhaps some of the other behavioural economics books such as ‘Nudge’ by Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler. Some of you will also have read ‘The Social Animal’ by David Brooks. Perhaps you will also be aware of Rory Sutherland and his superb TED talks (see attached for my favourite) […]
Over the past 6-9 months, we’ve seen an M&A frenzy which has been based on 2 considerations: the low cost of capital and the need to buy innovation. I’ve written about the latter before (see this link). From recent conversations with corporate strategists, the sad truth of the matter is as follows: In large corporates, disruptive innovation (not incremental) is either no longer feasible, cost effective (given the vagaries […]
The flow of transactions has been noted in this blog and throughout the financial press. In addition, the FT led an article earlier this week noting the volume of hostile deals (US appetite for hostile takeovers hits post-crisis high) as the M&A market heats up. I want to address in this some of the key challenges that distinguish hostile from friendly transactions. From my perspective, they fall broadly into 4 […]
The issues raised in a number of my recent blogs have led me to ask the question, is it better to use the power of the collective or the engagement of the collaborative in complex transformation. The nature of global corporates these days has changed with the increasing visibility, transparency and vigilance generated by regulators around the world. Each of these regulators bring different perspectives and pet requirements…but there are […]
With a shameless reference to Gary Hamel’s interview with Peter Day which I blogged on last week (the link is at the bottom of this blog), I want to explore a different approach with regard to organisational structure: What happens if we think about organisational structure as a means of communication, and not just control? As an aside, I suspect that for most of us, the control aspect of organisational structures […]
Recently, I’ve been investigating how children learn. It’s been an interesting discussion and has led me to some conclusions which are really relevant in the context of change management and learning in general within the corporate space. Whilst they are positive about their experiences with regard to their teachers, they also recognise the distance that exists between them. A distance which is probably a factor of age and perhaps experience. […]
I’ve had the great pleasure and extremely interesting experience of being ‘inducted’ into my new employer over the last 10 days and very good it has been too. The term induction has always had elements of the “Borg Collective” for me (for those of you who remember the early days of Startrek!) and there’s no doubt that some companies have a more Machiavellian approach to this than others…when one hears expressions about […]
Inarticulate ramblings of a management consultant 