The Failure of Success

When a few years ago I was at an international conference of about 150 public health professionals, one of the…

Followership

We live in the age obsessed with leadership. Everyone (clearly it’s in an overgeneralisation, but you get my point) wants…

How We Find Life in Death

“Death is very likely the single best invention of life.” – Steve Jobs Ever since the news of the coronavirus emerged, we…

Emergent strategy

Mintzberg famously coined an expression ‘emergent strategy’ to make a point that strategy was not all made up of what…

On (organisational) bullshit

Reading Frankfurt’s On Bullshit triggered a barrage of memories and thoughts for me. To paraphrase Frankfurt, bullshit is so pervasive…

Strategy as five Cs

The view of strategy as an intended plan is prevalent. But what drives us to develop strategies? It seems to…

Strategy as control

Developing strategies sometimes has an interesting quality of not really being about developing a clarity of action as action of…

Strategy as 5As

One of my favourite board games is Azul. It is simple enough that a 7 year old can play and…

Evidence based

Evidence based practice and policy sounds very cool. It instills a sense of… what’s the word? When you feel something…

Enlightenment and strategy

In human history, people always planned, plotted and developed ploys to survive, win and take advantage of their opponents or…

Certainty of uncertainty

It’s interesting to look back at things I was learning in my MBA and consider its relevance to the world…

Values and virtues

Whilst I was a Henley Business School we talked a lot about values in workshops and in coaching sessions I…

Revolution

These days everyone seems to be in the business of revolutionising businesses. One marketing statement after another claim to revolutionise…

Failing to fail

What is my understanding of failure? Perhaps not much different to a common view held by many people. Yet I…

Master and manager

What does it mean to line manage someone? Is it to control and manipulate or develop and enable people you…

Diminishing benefits

Over the years my son accumulated dozens of Lego packs that let him construct different things (cars, planes, boats, etc).…

Strategy and luck

I like strategy board games. Part of what I enjoy about them is working out how they work and how…