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Join our upcoming webinar Using Behavioural Science to Crack the Culture Code for Risk Management

Corporate culture is one of the most critical levers for creating shareholder value and driving organisational performance, yet one that most companies underutilise. Up until now culture has been extremely difficult to measure and transform as the underlying drivers are invisible. If organisations are unable to see, describe or measure behaviours, it is hard to know if the culture is helping or harm

Organizations typically focus on Customer-centric Design in their Strategic Planning and overlook the critical driver of Performance, Growth, and Operational Excellence—their employees.  With cut-throat competition now the norm the realization has become clearer that employees are:

• The face of the business and create lasting—or perishing—brand impression.
• Sources of innovation and organizational knowledge.
• Representation of the company’s service philosophy.
• Expected to live by its Organizational Cul

Traditional Talent Management practices fail to meet the high-potential talent requirements imperative to compete in the digital world today.  In fact, they disappoint the key talent available in the market.

A 2016 Digital Business research by MIT Sloan Management Review and Deloitte on 3700+ executives reveals attracting and retaining talent as the most pressing concern for organizations large or small.  The study indicates that organizations that are still using traditional approaches to manage

Changing industry ecosystems and competition today demand from the organizations to undergo strategic shifts.  The purpose of a company is undergoing Business Transformation from serving the interest of shareholders to serving all stakeholders that influence the organization.

Shareholders are often considered the only stakeholders that invest in a business.  Senior management needs to be cognizant of the importance of shareholders as well other stakeholders who create value for the organization. 

Culture is essential today in helping employees and management survive in today’s environment. Survival has become a strong word today. Without culture, everyone in the organization would act or behave differently. No one would be able to anticipate someone else’s behavior, and no one would understand why people behave the way they do. When this happens, the organization’s performance would be very chaotic.

What is culture? Organizational Culture is a learned process and is developed by the organ

Organizations are continually searching for innovative ways of enhancing competitiveness. This is brought about by evolving external factors such as changing demographics, globalization, and technology. Because of changing dynamics, it has required managers to rapidly rethink and retool their organizational management strategies.

Coming up with the appropriate strategies calls for an increasing need for organizational diagnosis in developing and maintaining a competitive advantage. Researchers be

FaB (Faster and Better) decision making is possible through the right categorisation. Without the categorisation used at Amazon between Type 1 consequential irreversible, and Type 2 reversible decision making that I wrote about last week, we run the risk of either undercooking or overcooking our decision making.

Lean Management plays a significant role in putting in place processes, capabilities, and tools to improve how businesses operate. But, the Digital Age has increased both the opportunities for businesses who know how to react and the difficulty of getting it right.

Tasks performed by humans are now more complex be it accessing information in multiple formats from multiple sources or responding to changing market and customer dynamics at an ever-increasing speed. As an increasing number of tasks b

Fab named their washing powder for its “fabulously clean, fabulously fresh and fabulously fragrant” qualities. My use of FaB is for Faster and Better decision making.

STOP. Don’t hang up the phone. You and I know that you and I are great decision makers…..and everyone else has the problem… right? So. This is not about your decision making. It’s about helping THEM. THEM being the people that work for you or the decision makers you are trying to influence.

Fab’s Fresh Frangipani has 15 key ingredien

Marie Curie provided insight, literally, that anyone would envy.

Ask yourself what insight a doctor in World War I would have valued most. Insight, not a wonder drug that is penicillin that was only discovered in the next decade.

Your answer (which I get very quickly when I ask it in workshop) may be “the ability to see bullets”. That is, bullets stuck inside the poor souls that had become “casualties” during the war. Curie designed, built and deployed (with the help of her 17yr old daughter) smal

According to passiton.com and brainyquote.com (see I’ve done my research, the internet never lies, right?) Marie Curie said “Nothing in life is to be feared; it is only to be understood.”

For those of you who are not right up on Curie, she was a scientist who discovered the chemical element now on the periodic table called polodium (named after her native Poland) as well as Radium from which we get the word radiation. Curie was a wonderful scientist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1

You want to be the best in your industry. The leader. The disrupter. Maybe you just want to think like a disrupter so you can understand the risk industry disruption poses to your organisation. No matter the reason, there is a question of capability.

You see, thinking like a disrupter is a mindset. And for traditional organisations it requires a mindset shift. To get you thinking, I recommend you watch this video or read the transcript.

                            Innovation is not enough

It’s a bl

There is an adage that attack is the best form of defence. I’m very sure it applies when it comes to disruption.

Does industry disruption disturb or excite you? Before you answer, consider this. Innovation is not disruption. Disruption is much, much, much bigger. Disruption turns an industry on its head. It creates massive shifts in markets, in how work is done and even if it is done.

Last blog I wrote about that feeling of being like a deer caught in headlights. I said that it was your job to get your colleagues moving from Assessment to Investment (or divestment) to Execution. Alternatively, I could have

In the age of rapid technological progress, where Digital Transformation has become pervasive, business applications are getting increasingly complex and interconnected.  The advancement in technology has also helped attackers get more aggressive and inflict more damage to IT systems and applications.  Application security tools and techniques are evolving too, yet most organizations still fall prey to vulnerabilities.  Cybersecurity has become a bigger threat than ever before.

The current applic

You know the saying. It means we can see something coming, but we can’t move. Like a deer in headlights, often traditional organisations experience sheer inertia when faced with the light beams of disrupters to their industry. All talk, no action.

Status quo talent strategies no longer work for high performing organizations. Old models no longer work. It does not anymore meet the needs of the global workforce.

HR Strategies are out of step with the way work is conducted. Jobs that are structured around a 9 am to 5 pm Monday through Friday workweek is considered inconvenient and counterproductive. Training focuses narrowly on skill building not on aligning talent capabilities with strategic objectives. Career development does not reflect th

You and your colleagues may often talk about what disruptor is just over the horizon. You might talk about AI, machine learning, robotics and someone will throw in a comment about “big data”. You might discuss how there is so much hype around future disruptors but little real action. But still, there is an inkling that there is a disruptor for your industry not far away. The problem then is, what might it be?

A big part of the problem is that you are so damn busy with the current challenges and o

A company’s cultural situation is challenging, multidimensional, and difficult to deal with. It constitutes a powerful set of emotional resources. To a degree, culture can be compared to natural forces such as winds and tides. These elements are there in the background, sometimes unnoticed, sometimes obvious. Endowed with immense power, they can waylay plans and inhibit progress.

Natural forces can’t really be tamed or fundamentally altered. But if you respect them and understand how to make the

There is a pressure cooker analogy for driving business performance. That is, apply plenty of heat to the pot (which is your team) and keep the lid firmly shut. The team will push harder to reach their goals. As a safety mechanism, all pressure cookers have a relief valve and so the analogy goes, make sure you don’t overdo it and build up too much pressure. The reason is because one of two things would happen: