Senior Executive Team Meetings, Often Resemble Junior High School Sock Hops

February 8, 2017

Mark Ridley delivered a fascinating TED talk a few years ago, titled, When Ideas Have Sex. He maintained that our species competitive advantage over other species has a lot to do with our ability to communicate ideas, which ideally meet and mate with other ideas.  This process gives rise to innovation and better ongoing adapting […]

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Resistance to Change is a Management Myth

January 25, 2017

How many times, and for how long, have so many of us said that “people resist change”?   I have said it for years, as one of those statements that I assumed was true but without adequately thinking about it.  Now, thirty-five years into the game of individual and organizational change, I see things differently.  My […]

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Living the Good Life, Well

November 30, 2016

In my personal opinion there is not much joy in living long if you are not living well. Living well has many dimensions to it, including financial, physical, and psychological/spiritual well-being. So when I think about “the next stage”, I am thinking about amplifying both the quantity and quality of the last third of either […]

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Stop Making Sense

May 16, 2016

I am often puzzled in both my own case, and with those I work with, why what we say we want to change is so darn hard to do. We witness in befuddlement all these “dysfunctional behaviours” that we and others engage in that undermine espoused goals. It doesn’t make sense! Or does it? It […]

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Thought of the Day

March 24, 2016

Good morning Leaders, I came across this quote this morning and it inspired this short piece on leadership development. We spend way too much time and effort on developing outer leadership skills, and not enough attention on unearthing the inner sources for bad leadership habits, releasing the hold those habits have on us, and developing […]

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Mind the Gap: A better approach to personal and team development

January 13, 2016

For those of you who have travelled the London underground, you are familiar with this image and message mind the gap. It’s that intermittent audio warning as you step from the station platform, over the gap, and into the subway car. As travelers, we are being asked to pay attention to the structure of the […]

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Executive Development: Moving beyond New Years’ Resolutions

December 10, 2015

The single, biggest failure of leadership is to approach organizational change as if it was a technical problem rather than a human adaptive challenge. Paraphrased from Ron Heifetz — Leadership without Easy Answers I agree with Ron Heifetz. Organizations are not good at adjusting, adapting, and re-aligning with a changing market. Typically, the larger they […]

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Developing Character Habits in our Leaders: Are we addressing a Sin of Omission or a Sin of Commission?

June 19, 2015

“People… do you realize we are contemplating firing, or at least sidelining, some of our senior talent for the same reasons we promoted them earlier in their careers…what is that about!?” A memorable statement from a CEO to his team during a talent-review meeting I was facilitating. The senior team was discussing and making recommendations […]

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Senior Executive Teams: Leading in Complex, Fast Environments

May 19, 2015

I have worked with at least 30 senior executive teams over the past twenty years, and have conducted over 200 confidential one-on-one interviews with members of these senior teams. I am left with two favourite quotes….the first one, which led to lots of work, and the second one which indicated to me that my work […]

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“Pop-Up Consulting” is a lively forum for dialogue to quickly get at the big issues that keep today’s leaders awake at night

March 23, 2015

Along with two of my colleagues, Mary Jane Braide and Jim Mikell, we have developed a new model for advising senior leaders and their teams on how to problem solve and act on significant opportunities. “Pop-Up Consulting” is a lively forum for dialogue to quickly get at the big issues that keep today’s leaders awake […]

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