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 [...]
- 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 [...]
- SWOT in Psychotherapy and Executive Coaching
SWOT analysis is a familiar tool in strategic management. Typically, it presents 4 scenarios: 1) the strengths of the organization as it surveys the world; 2) the weaknesses of the organization as it surveys the world; 3) the opportunities in the world as surveyed by the organization; and 4) the threats that the world poses [...]
- Working Knowledge Initiative: Entrepreneurship is Making Use of Reciprocity
A question from a client who’d worked in the non-profit sector throughout her professional life got me to thinking. She was adamant that entrepreneurship meant exploitation. And committed to community building, she was concerned that personal gain meant diminution of the common good. On reflection, what she’d left out was reciprocity. The only way that [...]
- Working Knowledge Initiative: Security and Temporary Organization
I woke up in the middle of the night with a singular dream image in my thoughts: it was an egg carton. Thinking about it, I started to chuckle. I recalled it exactly. It had been about 40 years ago— and the first time I’d travelled outside the United States. I had been investigating the [...]
- Case Study: A Working Knowledge Initiative Success
“ Its been quite a process with its share of ups and downs, but the business model is consolidated, our aims are clear, and what you’ve helped me to learn about my own strengths and competencies, I couldn’t have dreamed of eighteen months ago.” — C, on his successful use of the “Working Knowledge Initiative” [...]
- Curating the Accord Advisory Blog
Taking a page from our own blog, Accord set out this week to review what we’ve written for the last year. The idea was simple: in managing our daily affairs, the projects that are before us, and how these shape our identity over time, something gets lost. It can be likened to baking cookies: you [...]
- Composing a Language
One of the results of studying different disciplines– clinical psychology, psychoanalysis, group relations, business administration, organizational development, and industrial-organizational psychology—is a parochial confusion of tongues. What one discipline holds as the meaning of a word or concept is not its understanding within another, related discipline. For example, “personality” within the i-o world conjures the very [...]
