Are you spending precious time and energy trying to resuscitate “dead horses” — attitudes and ideas you should have given a decent burial a long time ago? Are you telling yourself that if you just “stick it out” all will be well, and the dead horse will miraculously come back to life? When the horse dies, get off! Stop wasting time and effort carrying it around or trying to resurrect it.

Leaders have never been more worshiped than now; paid such phenomenal salaries; had so many adulatory articles written about them. More books are written about how to be a leader, and more training courses offered on leadership, than ever before in human history. Yet the quality of leadership — in business, in government and administration, and in politics — has probably never been lower. We are certainly going to need real leaders again soon. The question is whether there are any left.

One of the major foundation blocks of trust is that people keep their agreements; yet life at work often seems rife with disagreements, betrayals, dishonesty, and disharmony. In working cultures without trust, there are no healthy relationships — just a constant watching of your back. Why should this be?

Human beings are the only species that thinks, reflects, questions, wonders, daydreams, imagines, and allows for curiosity. We can reflect on the past and ponder the future. However, in an age of 15-second sound bites, 24-hour in-your-face news, and the constant bombardment by, and use of, electronic devices, many folks are spending less and less time thinking. Why do we seem to be doing more while thinking less? What are we allowing to get in the way of using our mental faculties?

What are the consequences for an economy where so much is owed by so many to so few? Can you really be happy working for an organization which only exists to rob
and pillage? We don’t know much about the personnel management and career development practices of pirate ships, but we can assume they weren’t particularly enlightened. Reports from the time speak of ruthless psychopathic captains, promotion by intrigue and treachery, no job security and a ruthless financial short-termism.

Is there a difference between passion and purpose? How do the two connect?

Photo by ‘emmip’ (Morguefile.com)

There’s much discussion these days about passion and purpose in the workplace.
A Google search of “passion at work” resulted in 11,5000,000 hits. A search of “purpose and work” results in 21,300 hits. “Purpose in the workplace”, 61,400 hits. Even [...]

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 [...]

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: [...]

On 30th Street in Boulder, CO there is a sculpture of a man chiseling himself out of a block of stone.
The man’s head, torso, arms, and thighs have already been carved from the stone. His right hand holds a hammer above his head ready to strike a chisel he grasps in his left [...]

The grip of fashion, group-mindedness, and conformist organizational cultures

One answer to the question of why organizations are often badly run becomes clear once you consider the possibility that managers are using rational — even reasonable — responses in response to what are fundamentally irrational corporate systems.
Economists have always assumed that economic behavior is basically [...]