Menu

 

Welcome to the Adaptive Edge Blog

Here we explore insights on how you might manage your professional journey as the world becomes increasingly disruptive.

Stay ahead by subscribing to the Adaptive Edge newsletter today.

Sign up

 

Please note that this blog is almost two decades old (500 plus entries). Thus some of the content is:

  • More organisationally than individually focused
  • Reflective of more innocent times.

For the extremely curious it will give you a sense of how my thinking has developed over the years.

Is remote working working?

,

Is remote working working?

The grand experimentThe Covid pandemic triggered a spontaneous and global management experiment to explore the management implications of operating a largely remote workforce. How would it impact productivity? How would managers cope with not being able to hover over their subordinates?What’s in it for me?During the pandemic a new generation of people entered the workplace. […]

The Leadership Myth

dreamstime_m_147971843

There is a leadership myth, originating in Hollywood, that there is a well-defined set of competencies / attributes that leaders need to possess. It suits the executive education ecosystem to embrace this incorrect reductionist perspective. On the plus side, it gives the student a sense of certainty that they will leave the programme knowing how […]

Othering and organisational design

genocide

Caution: This is heavy, even by my standards. Othering is a process whereby a group of people identify another group of people as having traits that are different and potentially threatening to the group. This involves objectifying members of the othered group and possibly even denying their humanity. Effective othering involves precision cultural engineering to […]

Ubiquitous leadership – Leaders everywhere

dreamstime_m_85836900

Quiz time Which of the following do you believe to be true in respect of business leaders? They are generally overpaid relative to the workforce. Leadership education is optimised for uncertainty. Leaders lead and managers manage. That’s right. None of them are true. Well at least for most organisations on the planet, ie those built […]

Efficiency – A species extinction signal?

Efficiency - A species extinction signal

Life-death balanceAn increasing number of societies today have deified efficiency. Efficiency makes sense. A fundamental driver of any living organisation is to do what is necessary with the minimum expenditure of energy. For most of our time on the planet, nutrition was not just a click away. Thus each day was a balancing act in […]

Psychological safety – A new department opportunity?

Aggressive

As a leader, what is your take on psychological safety?It provides me with latitude in how I enact the company strategy.A symptom of a general degradation in the resilience of workers.It enables my team to challenge my decisions without being reproached.A cause for concern, given that ‘burnt out’ workers are happy to share their employer […]

Elon Musk and the future of work

dreamstime_m_41007058

The future of work is a valuable expression, but only from a search engine optimisation perspective. You’ll note that I have used it twice already. The term has developed a life of its own, so we now use it even when addressing the ‘now’ of work. This is just one of the ways in which […]

It’s time for a leadership reset

Emergency button

Values minimisation It’s a sign of the time when leaders in some organisations earn over a thousand times more than the median company salary. Are they really that good? Or is the upper limit of employee value contribution limited by the focus on having most people in the organisation operating as process monkeys, slavishly adhering […]

1 2 3 4›»