A leader is someone who connects with something deep inside you and brings out the leader in all of us. Ghandi, Churchill, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, these are some of the great leaders of our times. They inspired people to go beyond what they thought they were capable of to achieve something momentous for […]
Science against Silos – Why Organizations Need to Be Systems
The world of management is changing fast, and yet we still live in an environment where the prevailing organizational design is “functional/hierarchical” and organizations are thought of as a collection of silos. At the same time, we know that we are experiencing increasing levels of complexity. Why is it so hard to manage these increased […]
Can We Avoid Catastrophe with a Network Vision of Enterprises?
Reality is made up of networks. That’s what we’ve come to understand thanks to contemporary science. This is as true for biology and physics as it is for our social, political and economic reality. However, most organizations haven’t yet learned to catch up with this fact on a practical level. What do we mean by a […]
Schools as Centers of Innovation?
What if we could transform our schools from “assembly-line factories ” into centers of innovation? What if we could teach young people the skills they need to be able to adapt to an unpredictable future? We can and we must. When even science has to rethink itself… Anyone who hasn’t seen Sir Kenneth Robinson’s brilliant animated talk […]
The Peril of Silos (and what we can do about it)
“For those languishing at the bottom of a silo, there may be no way out.” This is the chilling conclusion of The Economist’s review of a new book ‘The Silo Effect: The Peril of Expertise and the Promise of Breaking Down Barriers’ by Gillian Tett. There is little doubt in our minds that silos and silo mentality […]
Don’t Cut Through Complexity: Understand it and Manage It (Sorry, KPMG)
KPMG has the tagline “Cutting through Complexity” which suggests they really don’t understand complexity at all. In order to deal with complexity, we first have to understand it, and then we can manage it. How? What does complexity actually mean? “Complexus”, the Latin word for “complex”, roughly means “twisted together”. In other […]
Educating for complexity: How do we transform schools into centres of innovation?
“The challenge we face is nothing less than transforming our schools from assembly-line factories into centers of innovation.” Those are the words of Michael Bloomberg, Mayor of New York City where the iZone project is transforming education. Clearly, the 19th style classroom and methods are not cutting it for the challenges of today. The iZone […]
