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In a previous post, I talked about the principle that: “if you have three hours a day and three priorities, you will make good progress. If you have ten hours a day and ten priorities, you will spin your wheels. So you can only afford three.” That naturally raises the question: So which three priorities … Read more

One of my clients ( a marketing consultancy) recently received an email from one of their biggest clients, a version of an email that a lot of people are receiving: “We’re very sorry, but given current conditions (all our stores are closed) we need to suspend operations with you for two or three months.” This … Read more

When I worked as a crisis manager, my job was to be successful where others had just failed. I usually found that my predecessor – the person who had just failed and been fired – was better at the job than me  in just about every aspect. Every aspect, that is, except the one that … Read more

I meet a lot of people who have brilliant new ideas to sell, and so many of them are frustrated. The video is a short summary of a seminar I did for a group of such people. In a nutshell, you need to offer something new, but also something old.

A lot change  management is framed, implicitly, as physics. There is resistance, which needs to be overcome. Applying force to the situation (urgency, fear of what happens if we don’t change, excitement about what happens if we do) overcomes that  resistance. This is well exemplifed in John Kotter’s work. This makes perfect sense if you … Read more

People use theories for two different purposes, one of which is much more helpful than  the other. The recent death of Clayton Christensen of The Innovator’s Dilemma – “disruptive innovation” – fame reminded me of controversies related to the theory.  The book was hugely successful in the business world, and then came the backlash –  … Read more

The time I should have been doing an MBA, I spent studying Taoist philosophy. It’s a maddening, fascinating collection of elliptically expressed ideas from a bunch of characters who were probably completely fictitious. That was 33 words that probably drove away 90% of the readers who happened across this. If you are still with me, … Read more

In a conversation  recently I heard the words “activity rate.” This took me all the way back to a conversation I had in Madrid in the mid-90s, and an issue that has come up repeatedly since then. I was talking to Santi, the Spanish country manager of a big UK medical publisher. He was under … Read more

The name of Sun Tzu will be familiar to just about anyone who has studied business strategy. I know one business school academic who told me that it was the only text you needed to read to pass the course. But yet, if you read Sun Tzu carefully you discover that he is actually quite … Read more