Many of us are watching the unfolding drama that is the real-time disintegration of Twitter, as both platform and organization. It is a spectacular example of culture being destroyed after a change in leadership. While Twitter is cultural destruction on a very large scale, the same challenges play out in organizations all the time, particularly as leadership changes. Culture is hard to build and easy to destroy. How do you recover from a cultural stumble?
Next Webinar: Lessons (Almost) Learned
21 November 2022 Peter’s career started back in the dark ages before personal computers. For a decade, he worked in the confines of the corporate cubicle. In 1993, he turned down a CIO position and decided to strike out on his own as a professional speaker, writer and consultant. He’s currently winding down his career. […]
Embracing Complex & Messy
The work that I specialize in is figuring out viable solutions to complex, messy and challenging projects. It is intense and it is consuming. There are also numerous pitfalls to doing it well. You try to create clarity around something that is inherently unclear. You also need to avoid making it too simple, where simple answers become tempting and potentially create further challenges. Doing this work is as much art as it is science.
How To Become Excellent
Most of us want to be good at what we do. We want to be exceptional. Figuring out what it takes to get there is tough. We need to know what excellence looks like, we need a realistic assessment of where we are and we need insight into how to keep moving forward in a way that supports continued growth. The challenge is that most of our formative learning periods have specific stages and outcomes that signal when we have arrived. The journey to excellence is a little bit more circuitous.
Strong Mayors: A Solution Looking for a Problem
On August 2022, the Ontario government introduced legislation to give “strong mayor” powers to the mayors of Toronto and Ottawa. This Municipal World feature explores the implications of this legislation. It asks where it came from, why it was created, its implications and whether it is needed. Awarded the best feature article of Municipal World magazine for 2022.
Process Shouldn’t Get In The Way
How people experience working with you depends upon a number of factors. A big part of that is process. As I have written about extensively, process is important. It helps to coordinate, to deliver results, and to codify expectations and principles into guidelines that can be followed. Those benefits tend to be internal to an organization, however. Frustrations and unintended consequences can occur when those same processes bleed to the outside. For those who lead with process, consider this a cautionary tale.