Fostering Counterfactual Thinking in Organisations

Business life-cycles continue to get ever shorter - outperformance quickly fades to the mean. In the 1990s only 10% of top quartile corporate performers were average performers 5 years later, whereas today 90% of outperformance has decayed within 5 years. There is a consistent&nbsp;imperative to reinvent your organisation, to continually have the hunger to do things differently - entrepreneurially. Entrepreneurship is often scrappy and chaotic, which is anathema to highly structured organisational behemoths - so there is an inevitable tension between the internal culture and the external context (which is closer to scrappy and chaotic, with events and issues such as the pandemic, climate change, inequality disrupting carefully laid plans).&nbsp; Imagination is both the root of and the route to new solutions - but as the authors note, those solutions almost inevitably bring the next set of challenges too. First though we need to reorganise the organisation to harness our human ability to enable higher-level cognition.

Martin Reeves on The Imagination Machine

Leadership, the Neolithic Revolution and Absentee Leaders...

Ryne Sherman is Chief Science Officer at Hogan Assessment Systems. He is also a professor of psychology but started out studying history - which may explain his interest in how early human beings organised themselves and how we have become more hierarchical and structured as societies ever since the advent of agriculture - and the impact and effect that has on modern organisations. In this conversation Ryne explores the impact of the Neolithic Revolution, and connects that to the modern-day requirement for getting to the top of organisations as being a political skill. He also shares his thinking around the growing mid-management issue of Absentee Leaders.

Ryne Sherman on the Nature of Human Nature

The Heart of Business

Hubert Joly is the former chairman and CEO of Best Buy Co, the giant US electronics retail chain. He took on the role when the company was considered in danger of failing and turned it around with a dramatic transformation through his 'People First' approach. Prior to his Best Buy Co job, Joly had worked at McKinseys and then increasingly senior roles at Vivendi and Wagons Lits. He is now a senior faculty at Harvard Business School. In this episode of The Chain he discusses his leadership approach. "What we're trying to do with each other and our customers, is to treat each other as human beings and see each other as human beings and be an inspiring friend for each other." Full transcript and video version available at www.ideasforleaders.com/podcasts/hubert-joly-on-the-heart-of-business

The Chain - Hubert Joly

Conversations on Making Organisations More Human

Former captain of the nuclear submarine USS Santa Fe, David Marquet, talks about how he developed the Intent-based Leadership approach while on the ship to enable devolved decision-making in complex situations - and how it can be applied to all complex environments.

David Marquet on Intent-based Leadership

Making Organisations More Human

The Chain is all about breaking poor leadership habits that most of us get shackled by. Chains are associated with tying things down and restricting movement - but they are also about connection and providing safety and support. These are the two sides of leadership, one is restrictive the other supportive. I'm Roddy Millar, founder of the <a href="https://open.acast.com/shows/6061b78a57ed335bef3b284c/www.ideasforleaders.com" rel="noopener noreferrer" target="_blank">Ideas for Leaders</a> platform. I created Ideas for Leaders to bring the best leadership research and ideas from academics at top business schools and thought-leaders in practice from across the globe to the desks and screens of managers around the world. The Chain leverages my extensive network to share the thinking of diverse and interesting influencers on leadership and on making organisations more human, more productive and more fulfilling. The podcasts are usually around 35 minutes long. There is also a, possibly apocryphal, story of General Eisenhower before he became 34th US President, training other generals. He would pile a heavy-linked chain on a table and ask the generals to describe where it would go and how it would lie if they were to push it - the answer being it could go any of several directions as it fell; however if they were to pull it, its direction would be clear. The concept of leaders having the choice of pushing their followers or pulling them was thus clarified.

The Chain

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