Special Forces, Elite Performance and Your Team (1)
You and your team are not the special forces.* You are not a skydiving team, a cycling team, or the inner circle or a presidential… Read More »Special Forces, Elite Performance and Your Team (1)
Organisational Development
Scott Sonenshein on Chasing and Functional Fixedness
Chasing is the idea that the more resources we have, the better results we can achieve. Chasing is detrimental because… it takes us off our… Read More »Scott Sonenshein on Chasing and Functional Fixedness
Elites: Oligarchy, Aristocracy, Decline and Fall
Two long quotations on a theme I’ve been mulling over for the last few weeks. We value excellence and equality (moral equality for sure, and… Read More »Elites: Oligarchy, Aristocracy, Decline and Fall
A Hole in the Heart
Your organisation can live for a long time with deep cultural problems: broken attitudes to people, to the work, to the people you’re trying to… Read More »A Hole in the Heart
Jo Freeman: The Tyranny of Structureless and Hidden Elites
Jo Freeman provides a helpful lens for looking at organisations, articulating things about organisational life that most of us know intutively but struggle to express… Read More »Jo Freeman: The Tyranny of Structureless and Hidden Elites
Bongkar Pasang
Bongkar pasang: Indonesian. To dismantle and reassemble (e.g. an engine) It’s like taking apart a bike… One of my side projects is rebuilding an old… Read More »Bongkar Pasang
The machine that makes the machine; or, matryoshkas of change
Elon Musk isn’t (just) building cars at Tesla. He started by building a car, but the end was never the car: the end was a… Read More »The machine that makes the machine; or, matryoshkas of change
Steve Blank on the four stages of Customer Development
Anything by Steve Blank on Startups is worth your time – especially if you work in a sector where people don’t think in terms of… Read More »Steve Blank on the four stages of Customer Development
Design Matters (8): Where’s that file?
I can make a reasonably sensible filing system, but tend to fall down when it comes to the practice of administrative maintenance. Like personal hygiene,… Read More »Design Matters (8): Where’s that file?
Eleph-ant; or, Small but perfectly formed
The word fragment is often misused to describe anything smaller than a bread box, but an eight-hundred page book is no more complete or unbroken… Read More »Eleph-ant; or, Small but perfectly formed