Do you remember Steve Covey’s seminal Seven Habits? There was a time during the 1990ies when that was one of my favorite management books. And if you happen to remember it, you might also recall his memorable quote about leadership: [Whilst MANAGERS are busily trying to - very efficiently —…

(A Sorry Tale of Superficiality, Misunderstandings and Woke) It seems that many of our current conversations about organizational and individual #transformation and #leadership have started to take undue and dangerous shortcuts to purport simplistic slogans and recipes, rather than promote deeper inquiry. For instance, it seems that we have found…

1) Leadership TRAIT theories don’t work. Only 5% in allegedly important character traits overlap across research, and it’s impossible to possess all of them. More importantly, any replicable correlation between Leadership success and traits is spurious. However, the idea that “anyone can be a leader”, whatever their traits, is equally…

A Passionate Plaidoyer For Our “Right to Retire” and Reinvent Ourselves Every 10 years Arguably, there has never been a better time to ‘take time out’ — as long as you can make ends meet. Why? BECAUSE the world is bubbling and aching and bursting in need of transformation. BECAUSE…

From Psychological Safety and Radical Candour to Radical Development Firstly, let me be very clear that I am not advocating organisations that use or tolerate fear, where employees are not able to speak up or have to suffer undignified or disrespectful working practices. My argument is more subtle, and applies…

The problem with STAKEHOLDER CAPITALISM remains, in my interpretation, primarily ontological. What does that mean? It means that when we “see the world” as a fragmented array of constituents who lay normative claims on the economy, or an Organisation, or the State, we quickly forget that such a perspective is necessarily incomplete. …

(Returning to the moral essence of “identity”) Whilst undoubtedly well-intentioned, positive psychology has often been criticised for being unduly individualistic in its ontology. Founded in a desire to rebalance a perceived over-emphasis of the “wounded self” in psychoanalysis, and to rectify the exploitative conditioning of behaviourism, positive psychology examines how…

By Antoinette Weibel and Otti Vogt (Inspired by a stimulating conversation with Blaine Fowers) In Search of Homo Economicus We have looked everywhere — the infamous ‘homo economicus’ has gone missing like Ötzi the Iceman! This abstract model of men who act and decide solely based on rational calculation of…

An opinionated mini-series in five [loosely connected] parts by Otti Vogt and Antoinette Weibel In the beginning organisational purpose was just a word, synonymous with ‘mission’ or ‘goal’. And few took note. Then, suddenly, it transmuted into a signal of…