Montgomery Burns is, Homer’s boss and is in charge of the Nuclear Power plant in The Simpsons. Anyone who’s seen The Simpsons can’t help but appreciate the humour in this character; he is a parody of managers and leaders everywhere. Here are some lessons from his leadership… How to succeed in business: Mr. Burns: […]
There is much cynicism about leadership within the world today. And yet there are more and more calls for leadership, and much commentary on the deficit of leadership in organisations and society. What’s missing? What is it that we are looking for and not finding? There are perhaps, many answers to this question, and I […]
It’s tough to be a heroic leader, but you put anyone in a position of responsibility (management, for example), and they will start to feel responsible. They will experience the need to know the answers, understand what’s going on, and to be able to solve all the problems that come up within their world. Rationally […]
In my work, I meet a lot of coaches and consultants. I meet them both as professional peers and as participants in the programmes that I run. There is one thing however, which is a pattern I see in many, which is the tendency to compulsively coach. What I mean by this is that they […]
A couple of weeks ago I went to see a play in Brighton Festival. I was invited by a friend and had no idea what it was about; I knew only its name: ‘And The Horse You Rode In on’. It turned out to be a fascinating mix of physical theatre, improvisation and scripted scenes, […]
“What is this life, if full of care, We have no time to stand and stare” from “Leisure,” by W.H. Davies Have you ever really thought about just how much you miss? How much is happening, or going on around you, that you never even notice or really see? Like most of us, you’ll probably […]
It’s fairly well established in organisations that what gets measured, and rewarded, gets done. If you reward people for individual performance then individual results go up (at least for some), and team work goes down. If you reward collective performance team work goes up, and some individual results decrease. Organisations that I have worked with […]
Conflicts have some basic commonalities – from ordinary workplace disagreements to Middle East peace talks the same basic, human dynamics play out time and again. The one which I will deal with here is the desire to win. I grew up in Northern Ireland during the Troubles. Occasionally, silly journalists would run stories about how […]
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Occupy protests: the tyranny of solutions
Much has been made of the current ‘Occupy’ protests; Wall Street and the London Stock Exchange, (located at St Paul’s Cathedral) being two of the most prominent, although I have seen similar protests in a number of cities in different countries. These protests are often criticised for not having any clear focus, demands, proposals or […]