“We need to re-think the culture of risk-taking,” writes John Fletcher. “In today’s bureaucratized and corporate world, individuals rarely suffer any major damage if the risks they take lead to disaster. Heads they win, tails we lose.”

Management isn’t rocket science, nor should it be, argues John Fletcher. Management theorists came to believe that messy reality could be reduced to theories and formulas. Nearly all turned out to work in theory and fail in practice. Yet there are sensible ways forward. You can read about them here.

John Fletcher offers a few tentative suggestions for getting through the future, whatever it may be. In his view, it will be entirely different from anything we have known recently, so we have to get rid of the neurotic longing for the familiar. Do that and you might find the idea of a different future liberating.

Saying sorry can feel like one of the most difficult things that you can be asked to do, but, as John Fletcher explains, leadership that will not accept responsibility is not leadership in any real sense of the word. Much of today’s world looks as though it’s run by whining adolescents trying to recast themselves as victims deserving of our sympathy, not the weak and greedy people they really are.

What do you do if your organization goes nuts? John Fletcher confronts the problem of staying sane in the midst of obvious symptoms of corporate madness.

John Fletcher surveys the mess caused by conventional ideas of managing business, government and the economy and wonders how and when ‘leadership’ became an essentially criminal activity. In place of seeking yet more gimmicks, shouldn’t we be focused on fundamental reform of a whole system?

Our world is undoubtedly complex, but the complications that led to the current financial crisis were all man-made. That’s the compelling argument put forward by John Fletcher in this provocative piece. We would all do well to reflect on what he writes.

John Fletcher reflects on the value of the lived experience and the wisdom that should come with age; and notes that it was the failure of so-called senior managers in banks and similar institutions to show either of these that is the root cause of our current mess.

John Fletcher muses on the true value of a job, and why losing consciousness of yourself and of your ego in your single-minded application to the task in hand counts for more than you may imagine in making any job worthwhile.

John Fletcher wonders why hierarchy is in such disfavor. For an idea that seems so natural, and has been independently discovered so often, it’s surprising how quickly it’s dismissed by management gurus. Is that another case of a fashionable management mythology that flies in the face of actual experience?