The Human-Centric model is no doubt desirable, but we have known that forever. Charles Dickens wrote about it when he described his boss Mr. Fezziwig in A Christmas Carol: “He has the power to render us happy or unhappy, to make our service light or burdensome, a pleasure or a…

The trouble began with the mindless transfer of the idea of agile from software development to general management. Here one senses that agile is struggling for the same reasons that all the management fads before it rose and fell in popularity. This is mainstream Anglo-American management's treatment of management as…

Provocative article! I am been exploring this ecological perspective and its implications for the management of public and private entities for nearly forty years. See https://www.strategy-business.com/article/Forces-of-nature

Underpinning the call for 'clear messages' is often a dated (back to the Enlightenment!) view of language as a representation of an immutable world of matter that is there 'to be observed'. This view still dominates mainstream Anglo-American management theory and practice. The universe may be made of matter (and…

The best hope for the humanities lies in movements like sense-making in management. It is favourable to bicameral, dual-process, embodied views of cognition, like that proposed by Iain McGilchrist in The Master and His Emissary. The Anglo-American mainstream instrumental emphasis on analytical thinking and explanations is embraced and contained within…

I have been working with the Mobius Strip for decades. I conceptualize enterprises as ecosystems via ecologist C.S. Holling's Adaptive cycle/Panarchy framework. It is the most generative framework that I have ever encountered. I used it first to make sense of my experience and now I teach it on Masters-level…

This is an excellent description of how a "vision" emerges from the complex interactions among people on a shared quest for meaning. Leading as emergent sensemaking. Emergence seems to be the stumbling block for mainstream Anglo-American, 'Cartesian' management. Instead of thinking about actions to create enabling conditions it wants 'blueprints'…

Kierkegaard reminds us that practitioners must act forwards into an unknowable future, while theoreticians can only understand events backward. Mainstream Anglo-American management valorizes the analysts and ignore the players and their experience. I have been teaching an EMBA course that addresses these (and other) issues at McGill and McMaster universities…

This fits with my experience as a manager. I can't offhand think of one facilitated workshop that wasn't based on the corporate agenda and aimed at getting "alignment". If Corporate HR was involved in any way you knew it was going to be a horror....