Dive into the archives.
- Aporia: On knowing. On not knowing.
It is 8:05 AM: my cup of coffee and Financial Times are before me as I prepare for US markets to open. Andrew Hill, writing the “On management” column today, presents a chilling precis on BP and the snail’s pace of corporate culture change with far wider implications for investors: “A safety survey of the [...]
- Beneath the Headlines: BP’s Radical R&D
Our headlines continue to engulf BP with our passionate blame. But increasingly, after we turn the page, another story begins to coalesce: BP as the genius of Big Oil’s future: it has been BP’s pioneering fieldwork in capping the busted Macondo well that has shaped Big Oil’s billion dollar emergency response plan for the Obama [...]
- Valuing Selective Attention as We Risk
BP is our tragedian of moment. Our anxieties are priced in the cost of its shares, off 50% since April. As investors, we anticipate significant punitive and reputational damages, eyeballing the $30bn gap between worst-case scenarios and its $20bn escrow fund, puzzling on internal bets between our personal fantasies of corporate resurrection and bankruptcy. What [...]
- DayTrading & Managing Our Own Minds
Increasingly, clients have described their turn to trading in volatile and uncertain markets, as their corporate incomes have vanished and their assessments of possible return to their former workforce positions have darkened. Day trading. Paradoxically, they have embraced uncertainty as their former sense of loyalty to firm and task has been disappointed. Their “security”, they [...]
- BP & the Federal Government: When Strategic Alliance Works
Tucked away on page 4 of today’s Financial Times is a story by Ed Crooks and Harvey Morris called “High level tensions behind the clean-up effort”. Its a most marvelous narrative both in its depiction of process and content in organizational cooperation. The context is familiar: the American populace, desirous of continuing our oil addiction, [...]
- The line is dead, but “If it ain’t broke…”
Friends have been e-mailing me, “are you all right, we’ve been calling and can’t get through”. Truth is, I’m fine; but with the phone down, I’m also unable to reset the pin number to retrieve my home voicemail— which must be accessed through the now incapacitated phone. Another minor example of customer dissatisfaction. But as [...]
- Organizational Dysfunction, Outplacing Emotion and a Man Called “Lynch”
In the movie version of the low-budget tv series, “The A-Team”, there is a running gag about CIA agents who all identify themselves– whether in Vietnam, Desert Storm, Iraqi Freedom, or home in the good ole USA, as “Mr Lynch”. The Kafka-esque or perhaps, Beckettian (thinking of Godot…) nature of the joke resonated deeply with [...]
- Thinking Out Loud: Making Explicit Individual & Organizational Similarity
An ongoing interest of mine is in linking the similarities across different psychological systems. Individual, group, and organizational systems share a number of common attributes. These include: a recognizable systemic identity; distinct rituals and practices; differences between the subject and other entities; specific intra-system roles and specializations; a capability to change; the fact that change [...]
- Executive Coaching, Greek Sovereign Debt, & Market Bubbles
This week’s mighty global market turbulence gripped both our attention and stomachs. Naturally, it entered consulting discussions as clients reflected on their relation to markets. Some thoughts: plentiful and current over-supplies of information, facilitated by technology, allow market participants to react more quickly (also helped by technology) than ever before while we react to momentary [...]
- Becoming a (Professional) Executive Life Coach
Perception is everything. And sometimes, it takes a bit of questioning for our own perceptions to align with others’. Recently, a client informed me that I was an Executive Life Coach. She of course, was the executive. And it was her life that I was coaching. She recognized too, that while she might otherwise call [...]
