Peter Drucker (1909-2005) was an American management consultant whose work has influenced how business is done for more than 50 years. He was a prolific writer and is often quoted, though frequently incorrectly. Some of his quotes are pertinent today, especially here in New Brunswick, Canada where we have dropped all public health measures in… Read more »
Posts Categorized: Management
super-connectors
Richard Claydon tells a story about a ‘super-connector’ he once worked with. This person was highly respected by everyone and could get things done across departments, ignoring the official hierarchy. “In today’s interconnected complexity of work, it is next to impossible to isolate performance to the granular, individualised level of a KPI. Everything happens in… Read more »
sensemaking through irony
How can we thrive in a broken system? This is perhaps one of the greatest challenges many of us face today, whether it be where we work, the institutions we deal with, or the governance systems that control us. Geoff Marlowe explains that how we perceive the situation and what type of humour we use,… Read more »
the weights on human resources
I will be speaking at the annual conference (online of course) of the CRHA [association of certified human resources professionals of Québec] on Wednesday 4 November this week. I will be explaining the personal knowledge mastery framework and how it can inform HR professionals for their own development as well as for their organizations. My… Read more »
weird stuff
Fiction sometimes explains reality in a much better way. Corvallis had asked the usual questions about job title and job description. Richard [CEO] had answered simply, “Weird stuff.” When this proved unsatisfactory to the company’s ISO-compliant HR department, Richard had been forced to go downstairs and expand upon it. In a memorable, extemporaneous work of… Read more »
zoom is not the problem — meetings are
When all you have is Zoom, every work-from-home office looks like an endless face-to-face video call. I have been working remotely since 2003. Video calls have been a regular part of my work and I have used pretty well every platform available. In the early days my favourite platform was Marratech, until they were bought… Read more »
slow media for the great reset
As of today, about 1 billion people are in some form of physical isolation. One of my clients, a global financial institution, has most of its over 200,000 employees at home. Many of these people are encountering distributed work for the first time. Free of the office and the commute they might be able to… Read more »
distributed liberating meetings
A great source of knowledge to plan and conduct meetings is Liberating Structures — consisting of 33 different meeting types for Revealing, Analyzing, Spreading, Planning, Strategizing, and Helping. The site links to free mobile applications — Google Play & Apple App Store — that explain what each structure is good for, how to conduct the… Read more »
managers are for caring
The evidence shows that while telecommuters create positive change, the major resistance against telecommuting comes from management. Our recent report showed that many workers we surveyed viewed managerial and executive resistance to telework as a major obstacle. Through interviews, we learned that executives saw the benefits of using flexible work to their advantage as a… Read more »
seeing the value of cooperation
Nancy Dixon tells a wonderful story about ‘Researcher’s Square’ and the hallway of learning. The whole story is well worth your time. It describes how a diverse group of mostly independent researchers who worked in their individual offices were able to cooperate and even collaborate due to a change in the built architecture. A central… Read more »
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