Blog

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.

Technological innovation and intensifying competition are forcing leaders to rethink how they use Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to manage and direct organizations.  Digitization has reinforced the importance of Key Performance Indicators not only in enhancing employee performance but driving the overall organizational productivity.

The role of KPIs is becoming more dynamic.  KPIs are getting demonstrably flexible, smarter, and valuable in achieving strategic advantage.  Leading technology-dri

Creating a culture that measures productivity objectively is a sensitive matter. Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are being employed extensively by organizations across the globe to monitor and track performance.  KPIs provide valuable metadata to improve top-down and bottom-up vertical efficiency.

Analytics-driven firms are aware that KPIs are much more than a tool to evaluate performance.  Utilizing KPIs, they gather valuable insights, create enterprise-wide accountability, and develop a goal-

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

Every firm will eventually reach the point when it has to professionalize the way it operates. This is done by instituting more rigorous processes, establishing clear governance, and recruiting skills from outside. Family Business is no different.

In the Family Business Survey, 43% of the companies believe that the need to professionalize the business is a key priority over the next 5 years. But the family firm has another dimension which other companies have to tackle: the family itself.

The issu

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.

Functional organizations are facing dramatic changes. Businesses are becoming more focused around capabilities and demand leaders of functions to play a more strategic role. With a less stable environment and more intense competition, a premium is put on agility and flexibility with an increased emphasis on performance results. In effect, functions are pressured to boost operation excellence while reducing costs.

But given the day-to-day transactional needs of business and the long-range in-depth

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

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:

Mark Bouris of Yellow Brick Road Wealth Management and ex Wizard Home Loans, a renowned market disrupter, gave a speech at the Risk Management Institute of Australasia (RMIA) National Conference in Melbourne last week. He made an appeal to the audience of risk management professionals.

Before the appeal, he gave a lesson on how financial markets work with respect to home mortgages. Then he explained how he disrupted the home loan market with Wizard Home Loans in the late 1990s and 2000s through s

If you are a lover of the Harry Potter series, you will have heard of parseltongue. The language of serpents. A Parselmouth is anyone able to speak parseltongue.

If you don’t have a clue what I am talking about, you are reading this and feeling at least a little uncomfortable. Relax, it is all make-believe.

However, don’t relax for too long because your influencing skills might be hampered by how you are providing your advice. Why? Because finance, HR, IT, procurement, risk and many other function

While the concept of “leading alongside” is a noble one for an internal adviser, it is not accomplished easily overnight. You see, the problem is the “unconscious” in “unconscious bias”. The decision makers you are trying to influence are not aware of the unconscious biases that may be clouding their judgement unless they have been trained to understand their sources and to recognise them. It is useful to understand and recognise the sources of their biases: genes, beliefs and aspirations.

Our un

The typical approach to improving productivity focuses on assessing variance in quality, time, rate, service, or cost, around which management systems develop incrementally or revolutionary.

Organizational Health Index, on the contrary, focuses on improving performance through improved alignment of organizational systems. For example, by improving competence of key components such as mindset, work design, technical expertise, or relationships; or through improving the interface between work proce

According to Michael Henderson, Corporate Anthropologist on Oscar Trimboli’s Deep Listening Podcast, people in the western world like threes because we like balance.

We like Low, Medium and High. We like the Three Little Pigs and Goldilocks and the Three Bears.

We also like it when a salesperson stops at three when telling us about the wonders of their product. Trust and desire builds to three and starts to wane above three. As in, “Why does she need to keep listing stuff? Is there something not g

Bedtime data stories are telling stories about data with data.

Have you ever asked yourself, “Why bedtime stories?”. Maybe you grew up with them and you have kept up the tradition. Maybe you understand they are good for your child’s development, in particular their vocabulary, comprehension and the development of their creative brains. If so, you would be right as evidenced in this research published in the journal Pediatrics.

However, there is more to it than their personal development. You are a

Those of you that know your maths know that an S-Curve can have an exponential portion to its curve but it can’t BE an exponential curve. However, I recently came across a diagram showing a series of S-curves overlaying an exponential curve which to me portrayed something very different to seeing either in isolation. It was in this post by Tim Urban The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence.

There are data miners and then there is data mindset. The former are the people and/or their tools that do the digging through the numbers. The latter is about a whole lot more. 

Last week I blogged about how to help people believe the numbers. This week I am going a big step further talking about four different types of data mindsets and the implications for decision making in an organisation (see figure).   

                                                                                 Data Mi

Decisions are all about emotion, however, numbers are so very important. At the end of the day if the bank balance is zero, no amount of emotion is going to change that. 
When it comes to numbers and decision making there are essentially three positions people take.