In late May 2009 I was invited to advise on change management on a big project in Sydney. The client was a medium size logistics organisation with a history of poor performance, low staff engagement and sub-standard customer service. They were in the midst of something of a crisis. They had been directed to substantially […]

Jean Louis Rodolphe Agassiz (1807–73) was a Swiss-born American zoologist and geologist who taught at Harvard. Imagine that you went to Louis Agassiz’s laboratory at Harvard as a student. Agassiz would place a small tin pan in front of you with a small fish and utter the stern requirement that you “should study it, but […]

Seth Godin has a new ebook out called What Matters Now. It consists of 80 or so thought leaders each with a page to talk about an idea that matters to them. Each idea is summed up in a single word such as Dignity, Autonomy, Attention, Difference. You can download the ebook here. Dan and […]

In my hands is a corporate strategy. It’s a glossy six-page document designed for every employee to memorise and enact. There are seven themes each with three sub-themes. There are also seven values. All the information is presented as dot points well set out with lots of white space for easy reading. Sadly this strategy […]

Registered Post is reliable system for getting important items from one place to another, right? Well read on – you might re-think your answer. Last night Con and Faye, old friends from Queensland, came over for dinner. As is usual in these circumstances, the beer and wine flowed and the conversation was non-stop as we […]

This morning, Shawn and I compared recent airline lounge experiences. Mine went a like this On Monday morning I took my Mum to the airport for her flight back to Melbourne. We arrived at about 9.15 am – the airport was as quiet as I have seen it. We had 30 minutes before the flight […]

In 2004 Drew Westen and his colleagues put together an experiment to see how people of a particular political persuasion (Democrat or Republican) make sense of new information. Drew is a neuroscientist and advises political candidates on how to garner voter support. In this experiment he scanned the brains of 15 committed Democrats and 15 […]

Most organisations I know have a set of stated values. You know what I mean, things like integrity, professionalism, respect for the individual. And in most cases they’ve been developed for the wrong reasons. And when developed for the right reasons, most employees don’t understand what the values mean anyway. Let me explain. Often the […]

Here are some thoughts/experiences from last week regarding anecdotes, how to elicit them and story-telling Last Wednesday I listened to Alana, an Aboriginal lady, tell a traditional teaching story and we chatted afterwards. In organisations we generally see stories morph over time, with details changing but much of the meaning being retained. Alana explained that […]