We’re stuck with the myth of the leader as action hero. It’s time we put it aside in favor of a more thoughtful approach. Failure to do so will condemn us to repeat recent cycles of boom and bust.

Humankind has an innate need to make sense of events: to fit them into some known pattern [...]

The assumptions that faster is better and “time is money” may turn out to be false — especially when it comes to benefits for anyone outside the executive suite.

photo © Darren Hester for openphoto.net (CC: Attribution-NonCommercial)

There are some assumptions in business nobody thinks to challenge. One of the commonest is that saving time means saving [...]

There’s good evidence that much leadership behavior borders on the psychopathic, but is this simply a response to organizational cultures that are themselves suffering from a fundamental sickness?

We’ve probably all seen articles that point to the close similarities between the symptoms listed as evidence for a diagnosis of psychopathic illness and typical behaviors of many [...]

We should all take time to consider the dangers of “management fundamentalism” and the dangers it brings.

Photo by Ramy Majouji, Wikimedia Commons

Writing in the British newspaper, The Observer, on Sunday March 23rd, 2008, Business Editor Simon Caulkin pointed to “management fundamentalism” as the primary culprit for the current financial and economic woes afflicting the global [...]

Today’s obsession with quantifiable objectives is more about office politics than performance

I was working for a well-known European government a couple of decades ago, in the days when quantifiable objectives for performance measurement were new and exciting — at least if you were excited by quantifiable measures of performance objectives. We had an office in [...]

Exploring an unexpected side-effect of the fashion for constant goal setting

Reading Gretchen Rubin’s article yesterday on Huffington Post (Happiness: Should You Have Goals or Resolutions?), I experienced one of those “aha!” moments.
Ms. Rubin wrote about life in general, but what she said seems to me to be especially relevant to the world of work, [...]

Reflections what it takes to build a more balanced life

The central principle of Slow Leadership — creating a civilized working environment — isn’t an easy task, especially in the present climate. It demands finding and holding a balance between legitimate business needs, career aspirations, social and family responsibilities, and leisure. And it isn’t being helped [...]

There are many hidden gods in the workplace — none of them worth worshiping

I was struck recently by a thoughtful post in the management blog published by The Age newspaper in Australia. It began with a reference to Gulliver’s Travels, Jonathan Swift’s masterpiece of a satire on the society of his day. Despite the [...]

In a world addicted to admiration of strong leaders, some kinds of weakness are even more essential

Photo by Roswitha Schacht

A thousand business books tell you to identify your strengths and weaknesses. So far, so good. But the implication that follows — that you should follow your strengths and either avoid or overcome areas of weakness [...]

In the workplace, those who have healthy relationships experience less stress, burnout, and similar problems.

One of the reasons abuse — especially verbal abuse in the form of harsh, negative and demeaning judgments and criticisms, gossiping, bullying and other types of non-physical assault — is common in the workplace is people’s lack of conversation skills: [...]