This post is a little longer than our usual ones – we hope you will bear with us and take the time to read it in its entirety and perhaps make a comment. Two weeks ago I was talking to one of our Network Members and the topic of VUCA came up. This acronym for environments that are Volatile, Uncertain, … Read More
The Scariest Halloween Costumes Your Boss Can Wear!
As Halloween approaches just imagine the scariest costume your boss could show up in if she or he came to your workspace asking for treats. Perhaps they might be totally scary showing up with no costume at all but here are a few that we think instill shivers of terror into most of us who inhabit the land of the … Read More
The Strategy of Christmas
For those of you reading this that celebrate Christmas I was wondering how your strategic plan for making this Christmas the best ever was going? It seems kind of weird to talk about having a strategic plan for Christmas but for many of us it is a very important time of the year, one that takes a lot of planning … Read More
The Tyranny of Certainty
Certainty is a brutal tyrant. We strive with great effort to meet its demands and most often fail. We have learned to live our lives under its oppression and because it is an idea rather than a thing we hardly even recognize its presence, let alone the havoc it creates. It is time to rebel. Most of what managers do … Read More
What Came First – The Interaction or the System?
Unlike the classic causality question about the chicken and the egg, the above question has a definitive answer. Interaction always precedes a system. It comes first. One definition of a system taken from an on-line dictionary is: A group of interacting, interrelated, or interdependent elements forming a complex whole. While there are many definitions of ‘system’ out there, this one … Read More
An Alternative Approach to Strategy – What We Do at TMS Americas
Over the past number of months our e-newsletters have offered differing perspectives regarding how people typically think and act in their organizational lives. With this has come a critique of mainstream organizational thinking, thinking that can be highly problematic, even damaging to organizations and the people that work in them. In many ways these e-newsletters have been intellectual exercises, encouraging … Read More
Our Addiction to Getting Somewhere
One of the dominant worldviews in our organizations is that we can only be successful if we are working towards some type of goal, a vision, target, or some future destination that we have determined is of value. This worldview is so pervasive that we cannot seriously consider other perspectives because we have no framework for thinking about them. One very critical … Read More