My last blog challenged leaders to stop hierarchy and bureaucracy holding their companies back in 2020. I also promised to provide some advice about how to overcome it, so this is the first of a series of articles addressing that challenge and providing advice about...
The majority of companies are way too bureaucratic and hierarchical for their own good. They don’t use the assets and capabilities that they have effectively and are failing to achieve their true potential. In fact, based on the work of Gary Hamel of the London...
I was a newly commissioned officer in the Royal Air Force when I was asked to inspect a junior airwoman. It was a task that fell to me because I was the Duty Officer that night. The formal inspection was part of her punishment for breaking some rule or other. She was...
Too often when we read about ‘management,’ the focus is on the behaviour of individual managers. Management is about much more than that. As an employee, whilst you might have a good or bad relationship with your line manager, you probably also feel ‘managed’ by the...
The focus on happiness at work is unhelpful and misses the point. Work isn’t about happiness, it’s about getting stuff done. As my Dad once said to me, “If it was meant to be fun, they’d have called it ‘fun’, not ‘work’”. I talk to audiences about how organisations...
We create job descriptions so that people know what we’re employing them to do and we sit them in teams of people that are doing similar things at the same time. Then we keep an eye on them to ensure that they do what we’ve told them to. We hire HR experts to help us...
