As a new year begins, reasons for fear and uncertainty are multiplying: the devastating effects of the climate crisis, threats of military action, accelerating polarization and blatant incompetence in prominent leaders in various countries. These are all symptoms of a world that is struggling to adapt to increasing complexity and interdependence. Far from being an […]
Celebrating a Year of Disruptive Thinking
As 2019 comes to a close, all of us at Intelligent Management send our warmest wishes to those who have taken the time to read our work. We are proud to have concluded another year of disruptive thinking. It is not disruption for the sake of it, but the creative disruption that comes from challenging […]
The End of the McKinsey Model of Management Consulting?
A new book is asking why young people who arrive at college and want to change the world end up working for Goldman Sachs and McKinsey. ‘Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World’ by Anand Giridharadas explores how “the global elite’s efforts to “change the world” preserve the status quo and obscure […]
Changing How We Think Business for the Digital Age
We were recently asked an important question following an article of ours about the dangers of linear thinking: “I can see how organizations could get stuck in one way of thinking as it often happens. How can organizations avoid being linear while forming their strategic plan?” At Intelligent Management we take a systemic view of […]
Why Management Urgently Needs the Scientific Method
The following is an excerpt from Dr. Domenico Lepore’s new book ‘Moving The Chains’. Before I began working in the field of management, I was educated as a physicist. However, it is not necessary to be a scientist to appreciate that from Galileo Galilei and Newton onwards, all the things that we know (as opposed […]
From SWOT to Systemic Strategy
When we published our post about how to take the SWOT analysis to a whole new level we received a lot of attention and some good questions. One of the best is below: And here is our reply: The SWOT analysis can be a helpful brainstorming tool as a first step to understand our current […]
Educating Executives for Systems Leadership in the Digital Age
The Managing Director of the World Economic Forum recently published an article called ‘Why the World Needs Systems Leadership, Not Selfish Leadership’ The article concludes: The self-important don’t always win. Selfless leadership can create systemic change that spreads happiness – instead of hoarding it. At Intelligent Management we have been educating executives to be Systems […]
How to Take the SWOT Analysis to a Whole New Level
This week, a client of ours drew up a SWOT analysis and it turned out to be a very productive event. The SWOT analysis tool has been around for a very long time. The Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats categories are comfortably familiar to many as a way of brainstorming and analyzing the current reality of […]
Why Projects Complete “Sooner or Later”…
What is a project? It’s a word that everyone is familiar with but it can mean very different things to different people. This can lead not just to misunderstandings but to intrinsic unreliability in delivery. In other words, far too many projects in the world get delivered “sooner or later” with all the knock-on negative […]
Achieving Predictability in Uncertain Times? Learn to Understand Variation
We live in such astonishingly uncertain times. So let’s do something that’s good for our mental and emotional health and lend some attention to an aspect of management that’s grounded in science and related to predictability. This is strongly connected with our previous post about Dr. W. Edwards Deming, the father of Quality and the […]