Confidential discussions concerning employees are pretty much the bread and butter of HR. However, the tone of these discussions is sometimes not too far removed from plain old gossip - or at least driven by the same base motivations that animate the slanderous tongue. It gets tricky when you are in a conversation which is... Continue Reading →
Lack of Completion Fatigue
OK's newsletter today had a seemingly pithy observation: people do not have initiative-fatigue in companies, as no-one decries something new; what people have is lack of completion fatigue - that sense of frustration at vacillating intentions and aborted initiatives people see around them. While I agree with some of the wisdom in the statement, it... Continue Reading →
Leadership & Culture
We were working on the design of a new program today, aimed at instilling a strong sense of cultural identity and evolution in new managers. It is proving to be quite a sterling success, at least design-wise. In the process of brainstorming and playing with different design ideas, I seemed to feel more and more... Continue Reading →
Two Roads Diverged: A Frisson of Frost
Cycled to work today. It takes me about half-an-hour, but my favorite part is the final 10 minutes through open fields and farmland. Parts of the track wending through the grass are little more than a few inches wide, punctuated by puddles and bumps. In the summer, overgrown weeds along the edge of the track... Continue Reading →
Cows & Goats: A Day at the Zoo
Took a trip to Planckendael today - the sprawling and somewhat unkempt quasi-zoo between Brussels and Antwerp. They don't do zoos well in Belgium. This was a kind of safari on foot through an unpaved and confusing meshwork of tracks, bearing little resemblance to their ostensibly user-friendly hand-drawn map. We walked for what seemed like... Continue Reading →
Modesty: Holding Back & Shining Forth
Today was the first of three days of Executive Exchange that each of us is signed up for as part of the program. I'm with Pascal, the CEO of the main water utility company of Antwerp, the commercial hub of Belgium. He spent the day with me on the 20th, and I was at his... Continue Reading →
Seas & Swamps: The Never Ending Story
A dreary day. Lassitude has stolen into me today, and chloroformed any sense of initiative. It is all the more frustrating when one cannot see any obvious explanation for the paralysis of spirits that seemingly strikes at random. I suppose there is a ready enough explanation though: several small sources of malaise might converge around the same time - really trivial... Continue Reading →
Forks & Knives: Choice and Separation
Quite a significant day today. Got a call from SH about him and his people being quite interested in the idea, generally making me feel chuffed. I didn't think I would be mentally prepared to confront a fork in the road quite so soon, or have the decisiveness to flip open my Swiss-knife and cut... Continue Reading →
Sacred Cows & Spittoons: Faking-Friendly Fads
I can't help marveling at how the maturity, sophistication, and impressive intellectual capital of an organization seems to become so feckless and cramped in the face of forces that derive from patently short-sighted motivations. All it takes is for a few key people gifted with lumbar pliability to convince the circus master of their contortionist... Continue Reading →
What Matters: Reflections in Twilight
An aphoristic remark I heard at John's recent farewell is worth recording. While it could be easily dismissed as a bit of mildly amusing word play of the greeting card genre, it has an amazing poignancy because of who made it and whom it was about. The laconic and mysterious ex-MD of Poland had specially... Continue Reading →
Notes to Self 