Blog

How process-heavy internal systems stall innovation and choke Strategic Intent 

Bureaucracy, in its earliest form, was meant to be an enabler. A set of rails to prevent derailments. A record keeper s...

Enemies – Poor Leadership and Strategy and an unreasonable Culture of Fear to risk! 

Somewhere along the corporate road - around the time legal and financial departments began writing handbooks and p...

Why initiative is the lifeblood of innovation, and fear the slowest form of failure:

In every successful organisation I’ve worked with, there has been a consistent undercurrent—sometimes formalised, ...

“Why the best strategies live in conversations, not in PowerPoint folders” 

Over the years, I’ve been handed and examined many documents called “Strategy” on their cover. Some were thick enough to se...

Success is a strange substance. Initially energising, it can also become intoxicating or blindingly arrogant. And if left to harden—without question or renewal—it often turns from fuel into fossil. I’...

If you want to find complexity, you don’t have to look far. It seeps into processes like damp in an old building—quietly, persistently, and always in places you least expect. Most organisations aren’t...

The first time I realised that leadership was less about intelligence and more about energy, I was standing in a High Tech Company in Switzerland, watching an exhausted team half-heartedly push throug...

Culture is not the carefully curated phrases on the office walls. Nor is it the uplifting paragraphs in the joining-the-company manual. Culture is what people do when no one is watching—and especially...

Somewhere along the evolution of the modern organisation, meetings became a proxy for progress. Where once they were brief pit stops for information exchange, they’ve since mutated into a sprawling ri...

Too often, business structure is mistaken for an organisational diagram: rectangles, reporting lines, and a faint hope that it’ll all make sense in practice. But in reality, structure should be  archi...

In systems engineering, we begin with stakeholder needs and break it down into functions in terms of subsystems, interfaces, and feedback loops. This logic applies equally to a product rollout or an o...

(Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics)

Why STEM Needs a New Kind of Thinking

In the early 20th century, it was enough to be a good engineer, mathematician, or scientist by staying in one...