How is it acceptable to assume is that the productivity of our people stays constant in periods of intense change / stress? Everything in life is relative. If you question a 5 year old about how successful an activity was, they will give you a relative answer…”it was good but not as / better than good as the last one I did.” And when you ask the question why (if […]
Mindfulness in the Age of Complexity. Very interesting if slightly longer than necessary article around the relatively new concept of ‘mindfulness’. You will find some good nuggets in here…just might require a little digging!
With thanks for an excellent seminar last night by Thomas Martin of Forward Intelligence Group and previously Microsoft, and also a reflection from a number of other clients and colleagues, I’ve been observing an interesting series of phenomena in the last few months. A redrawing of some of the traditional boundaries between transformation and business as usual activities, specifically when it comes to allocation of CAPEX. It seems that there […]
With apologies for a slightly introverted blog, I wanted to raise an interesting issue which has been raised by three people this week who’ve somehow stumbled upon this random collection of thoughts and ideas in the last week. It appears that what people like most about this blog is the candour and openness of the commentary. Why is it so difficult these days to give an honest opinion without fear […]
For many of us and indeed for many of my clients, the activities of global functional leadership can be a source of frustration and occasionally extreme irritation. That’s not to say that the individuals within those functions are not performing to the best of their ability and don’t have all the right intentions for the business. Indeed one might say that to have reached that position requires talent, a strong network and […]
Now before you all bombard my blog site with death threats, this is not going to be a diatribe against the qualifications which are prevalent in the arena of programme and project management. I fully accept that these have a place and a value, and for someone starting out in the world of complex programme / project management, having the confidence of this type of certificate is clearly important and […]
As the referendum for Scottish independence draws closer, the crass opportunism and incompetence of those who are supposedly in charge of our economies becomes more and more apparent. I’m drawn to an analogy in the corporate world…would we let someone trained in the dark arts of public relations take the role of a CEO / CFO / COO? Would we let someone who was an excellent after dinner speaker take control […]
For several years, I’ve been drawing the same picture…the one which illustrates that the percentage of a company’s activities related to business as usual versus that related to what I call ‘special projects’ has been changing over the past ten years, in favour of the latter. By special projects I mean: mergers and acquisitions joint ventures new product launches new territories expansion significant change in strategy and subsequent implementation requirement […]
Originally posted on Paul4innovating's Innovation Views:
Let’s start with some defining statements. Innovation is totally dependent on becoming aware of external ideas and the knowledge that is needed and then translated for it to become new innovation. We can ‘fall over these ideas’ or we can find ideas or concepts through explicit search. Then to translate these and turn them into something new and different we need to…
I was listening this morning to the Forum on the BBC which had an archectural theme to it, notably including Stephen Bayley, a commentator with whom I had dealings some years ago and whose opinion is always worth listening to. He made the point that the completion of very large, eye catching buildings seemed to frequently coincide with an economic downturn and quoted Dubai and various buildings in London, the […]
Much of my work in recent years has been to work with senior managers who are looking for some kind of a magic bullet to give them an insight into their organisation…a data set which: They can trust where the ‘provenance’ is clear and consistent. The consistency in particular has to relate to qualitative experiences they’ve had with their employees or other relationships they have internally or externally Relates to their own experience either […]
The nature of the office workplace has changed almost beyond recognition in the last 30 years. The pace of change in terms of activity, responsibility, speed of communication, access to information and people, and complexity of the ‘transaction’ whatever the company might be engaged in, are all vastly different. Gone are vast numbers of manual tasks and with them activities and roles in the workplace. What is required these days […]
As I get older and the needs of my family change, the inherent inefficiency of traditional reward structures becomes more and more obvious. What I mean simply is that the requirements I had of both salary and benefits when I was 20 or 30 are no longer relevant to me, indeed more importantly than their practical purpose is the reduced perceived value that they offer. Much has been written and […]
For those of you who’ve worked with me in the deals / post merger integration environment, this rant will be very familiar and i apologise for repeating myself in this forum…but I was reminded once again of this in a conversation with an old colleague. Let me take you through the way the discussion normally goes, the participants being an HR person and me in a operational due diligence and […]
Pcubed : Insight : Insight #1 :. Some interesting, personal, observations from a conversation with Sim Preston of AIA. He gives some very powerful perspectives in terms of the upside and downside for 2014. Definitely work a read.
You Can't Pursue Happiness if You are Sitting Still. The headline of this blog is a little misleading…however the contents are interesting, not only because of the fact that I have a teenager, but also because there seems to be an increasing discussion around the subject…Craig Ferguson’s diatribe on the Late Late Show is a good example. Worth a read.
It may seem strange to those of you who know me that I’m in the profession of planning otherwise known as project / programme management. For years, my life was anything but planned, work opportunities seem to occur through a combination of chance and happy circumstance. Obviously it’s been easy to post rationalise my various moves (!) but the reality was very different. That was not however due to a […]
I’ve been on a few flights this week and beyond catching up with my favourite shows on the BBC iPlayer (!), the article penned by Malcolm Henry which I reposted last week, seems to be having a disturbing effect on me! Malcolm was describing the debate in Scotland as to the establishment of a bill of rights and his proposition that a bill of obligations would be much more powerful. […]
