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Management

The Problem with Measurement – How KPIs can Send You Backwards

Some trivia for your day. Did you know that humans have the same number of genes as mice, a few more than worms and nearly half as many as a rice plant? And that they are pretty much the same genes? Such are the findings of recent genetic research. We can all learn something from [...]

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The One Thing You Need to Remember

“I am constantly amazed at how stupid I was two weeks ago.” This is a wonderful comment on lifelong learning from American consultant and writer Alan Weiss. It holds a lot of truth. It is incredible how even a small experience or lesson can make our world look quite different from what it did only [...]

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Simplicity: Still an Idea for the Future

AFR Boss magazine, like most magazines, loves lists. About once a year this management magazine publishes a list of ‘big ideas’ for the future. And nearly every time, guess who’s nearly always on the team? You got it: Simplicity. This time Simplicity shares the honors with a range of  creative ideas including ‘nanotechnology’, ‘disruption’ and [...]

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Fail Your Way to Success – and Simplicity

One of the reasons there is so much complexity built into modern organizations is a deep aversion to risk. The fear of failure, or, more specifically, the fear being blamed for a failure, causes managers to build layers and layers of checks and balances into systems and processes. These checks and balances act like clots [...]

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Keeping my Helicopter out of the Whirlpool

A thought for the weekend. I’ve had a fairly intense week with clients who are confronted with a range of complex issues.  As the week ends, I’m struck by how much effort is needed to stay ‘above’ the detailed issues in order to maintain a ‘global’ perspective. It is that nature of my work that, [...]

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Is this Force Holding you Back?

My monthly article for Business Simplification looks at a persistent barrier to simplification. When my nine-year-old daughter grows up, she wants to be a teacher, scientist, inventor, musician and waitress. All at once. Her ambitions fit neatly with her place in what Edward de Bono calls the age of “Why not?”. It’s a wonderful ‘no-holds-barred’, [...]

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Ignoring the Hidden Costs

I’ve just finished writing a cheque and addressing an envelope to pay for my daughters’ music lessons in the upcoming term. Why go to all this trouble? Because the music school charges a 2% surcharge for electronic payments. So it’s cheaper for me to send them an old fashioned cheque. This all-to-common scenario illustrates one [...]

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Timely Reminder from a Web Veteran

I’ve been reading Gerry McGovern on web content management for years. He’s a leading advocate for maintaining a level of simplicity in intranets particularly. In a recent piece, he uses a strong analogy to restate a couple of the main principles of simplicity in practice: Complexity tends to self generate, largely as a ‘protection’ mechanism [...]

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Won’t we Ever Learn?

Speaking of learning from the past, Leon Gettler’s Management Line comments today on the continuing ability of internet scammers to successfully pull of their stunts. It never ceases to amaze me how, as a race, we fail to learn from the past and continue to make the same mistakes over and over again. This isn’t [...]

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Words of Simple Wisdom from the Attic

I just stumbled across a 10 year old interview with the late Ken Iverson, long time CEO of U.S. steel manufacturer Nucor. His philosophy on management centres on keeping it simple. And it helped grow Nucor into a leader in its industry, and an outperformer of the market, from near bankruptcy in the 1960s. (Nucor [...]

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A Simple Truth about Work-Life Balance

Speaking of Balance, this month’s article for Business Simplification just happens to be on that topic… It all started well for Russell. Like a growing number of busy 21st century managers, he wanted more balance. He counted himself lucky when he and his wife worked out they could afford him to cut back to four [...]

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