Rushkoff's Demythologizing of the Marketing of Power
How does "power" sustain itself? Force is not enough, as the power of its "subjects" to topple power through rebellion is always greater than that of the ruling elite to exercise control, as the...
View ArticleA Note on Excellence and the Pursuit of Happiness
An American client working at a German company reflected with me last week on an insight she had come to about working and living in Germany. What surprised her was how many quietly competent people...
View ArticleUmair Haque and Saving Capitalism
In an article in Vanity Fair by Michael Lewis on the Irish experience of the financial crisis, one biting comment particularly caught my attention: "Even in an era when capitalists went out of their...
View ArticleTwo Planets Meet in Space...
I saw this somewhere years ago and couldn't find the source anymore, so here is a homemade version. The problem is not so difficult to understand, once we get some distance on it… See the full gallery...
View ArticleThe Psychology of Transformation
"Alas, two souls beat within my breast!" groans Faust, as he struggles to reconcile competing interests in himself—and so Goethe describes the existential condition of us all: we are not one with...
View ArticleThe Emergence of Complexity Theory in Consulting
During a change project at a car parts supplier a few years ago, a process consulting colleague of mine went off on a rant when he heard that the company had just paid a six figure sum for the months...
View ArticleNarrative Strategies and the New Approach to Irrationality
Enlightenment reason is dead. The final nails in the coffin are being provided by neuroscience, which has made clear that our thinking is embodied (Antonio D'Amasio) and not Cartesian, emotionally...
View ArticleReport on SenseMaking Accreditation at Cognitive Edge
Amsterdam was beautiful last week, a fitting backdrop to the accreditation course provided by Cognitive Edge that I attended. Given my last post on the methodology, let me say that my take away was...
View ArticleA Short Meditation on Politics and Creative Destruction
Watching the blockade in the US Congress over raising the budget deficit gave me pause to reflect on the nature of the progress of humanity. The dishonesty of the debates and their careless use of US...
View ArticleGerman Culture and Complexity
In a new Vanity Fair article on the role of the Germans in the international financial crisis, Michael Lewis, the author of the trenchant Big Short, reports on an interview road trip he takes to try...
View ArticleOn the Blind Spot for Complexity
Written in response to a comment on my guest-blog contributions at Cognitive Edge: I too have been getting questioning looks when I present enthusiastically some insights from complexity theory to...
View ArticleOn the Emptiness of Thinking and the Richness of Experience
Reposted from the Cognitive Edge Guest Blog I am writing this week: I'd like to comment on Keith's comment about my notion in my first guest post that ideas in themselves are empty. I agree that many...
View ArticleGetting Practical
When thinking flows, I find that I often don't know what I'm going to say or write until I listen to what I am saying or read my own texts. Writing this blog often serves that purpose, helping me in...
View ArticleThe Value of Culture
Part of the big shift which is taking place in business and society derives from a fundamental breakdown in what one could call a piecemeal or single issue approach to life. One of the most common...
View Article"It will all be okay in the end…"
I found this hanging outside the office of a client… Permalink | Leave a comment »
View ArticleChange, Trauma and Business
Last week I started taking a three-year professional development programme in Somatic Experiencing, a trauma treatment process based on the work of Peter Levine. Though I am not a therapist, my...
View ArticleAmerica's Strangely Ambivalent Relationship to Competence
We're on vacation, so I've had some much yearned for time again to do some reading and peruse the blogscape for mental stimulus. Following a tweet from Richard Florida titled "Is Meritocracy a Sham?"...
View ArticleMoral Foundations Theory
The state of western political and moral debates has left me speechless (in the blogging sense) over the past year, as I try to fathom the both the inanity of our current discourse and the...
View ArticleThe Conflict between Learning and Results in Talent Management Strategy
Two clients of mine have posed the question to me about how HR can operate successfully in the emerging environment of complexity and Gen X employees challenging companies today. The question is...
View ArticleComplexity-Based Talent Management
Compliance is killing our organizations, and the function in which this is most painfully obvious is Human Resources. People are among the many living things which cannot practically be reduced to...
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