A critical glossary of contemporary management terms XI – organisational...
Move fast and break things – this is the poster that one of the Tech Giant CEOs is supposed to have in his office. The invitation to ignore social conventions, perhaps even to avoid consulting people...
View ArticleComplexity and Collaboration – implications for leadership and practice
Complexity and Management Conference 5-7th June 2020 If collaboration was that straightforward, wouldn’t we all already be doing it? Collaboration is another one of those motherhood-and-apple-pie words...
View ArticleA critical glossary of contemporary management terms XII – leverage
Give me a still point, and I will move the world, Archimedes is reputed to have said by Plutarch. The idea is that finding a fixed place and using mathematical reasoning enables a relatively small...
View ArticleA critical glossary of contemporary management terms XIII – unleashing potential
In the current Brexit debate in the UK politicians from the Conservative Party repeat certain words and phrases ad nauseam until the message is drummed home to an exasperated electorate on the...
View ArticleA critical glossary of contemporary management terms XIV – VUCA (volatile,...
If management is understood as a discipline which tries to control things, to place things under one’s hand (manus), then the concept of complexity poses something of a dilemma. The phenomenon one is...
View ArticleA critical glossary of contemporary management terms XV – metrics
The UK government has tied itself up in knots over metrics. The Health Secretary Matt Hancock originally promised 10,000 Covid-19 tests a day by the end of March, a target not reached, and then...
View ArticleA critical glossary of contemporary management terms XVI – Leadership Part I
In many ways leadership has emerged in all kinds of encouraging and unexpected ways in this current crisis to break our sense of dependency on idealized individuals. Young medics have gone to work in...
View ArticleA critical glossary of contemporary management terms – XVII roadmap
Recently the Prime Minister of the UK, Boris Johnson, set out a ‘first sketch of a road map for reopening society’. Meanwhile, Nicola Sturgeon the First Minister of Scotland set out a route map and...
View ArticleA critical glossary of contemporary management terms – XVIII challenge
Challenge, to invite someone into a competition to establish who is superior, a call to prove or justify something, or to dispute the validity of something is now used universally in organisational...
View ArticleA critical glossary of contemporary management terms XIX – Vision
Vision, the faculty or state of being able to see, the ability to think about or plan the future with imagination or wisdom, is one of those grand words of contemporary leadership discourse which is...
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