Almost any sizeable company nowadays has a code of ethics. The main catalyst for this were the corporate scandals in the early 2000s (Enron, Worldcom, Tyco, and others), and in the last couple of years having a sense of purpose has become pretty much en vogue.

As a result, every year millions of employees now dutifully complete e-learning modules and sign declarations (‘To the best of my knowledge…’).

The difficulty is that corporate codes of ethics are ‘duty-centered ethics’. Duty-centered ethics are ethics people need to formally adhere to, given their role or position in society. 

The real test for the way ethics are adhered to in organizations is therefore not the formal compliance with the code of ethics (for instance proving all employees completed their mandatory e-learning), but what happens in the daily reality of business life.

In this podcast, I talk about how organizations can achieve this. 

I hope you like this podcast. Let me know!

I always felt sorry for the many famous artists in the Renaissance, who needed to compromise the quality of their work and their artistic integrity, in order to make sure their art suited the requirements of their patrons.

This challenge is not uncommon to the one management consultants and other professionals in business face. How can we translate professional integrity into commercial reality?

For a variety of reasons, a number of line managers frequently want to do the work of their direct reports. However tempting this might be, doing the work of your team is rarely a good idea, neither for you as a line manager, nor for your team. 

In the world of professional soccer, you are either a coach, coaching your team from the side, or you are a player in the field.  As a soccer coach, you cannot occasionally enter the field during a match, start playing with your team, leave the field again, and, a little later, reenter the field to play again. 

And for good reasons...

The book 'An Ugly Truth - Inside Facebook’s Battle for Domination’ by Sheera Frenkel and Cecilia Kang, describes the different scandals Facebook has been involved in in the past couple of years. 

The value of this book, compared to other recently published books about Facebook, is that it provides readers with a unique perspective on the impact the motivation and (lack of) ethics of the key decision-makers have on their decision-making.

At the same time, reading this book can teach us a lot about the importance of ethics in business.

When Steve Jobs launched Apple's 'Think different' campaign in 1997, he positioned this by saying: ‘This is a very noisy world, so we have to be very clear what we want them to know about us’.
Since then our world has become only noisier. Therefore we need to do three things if we want to make sure our audience understands what we want them to do.

In this podcast, I review why self-managing teams are an illusion, both in a theoretical, as well as in an empirical sense. 

Links to various sources I am referring to can be found in an article I wrote about this topic which ca be found here: https://tinyurl.com/ybvnwvds

I hope you enjoy this Podcast. Let me know!

For many (senior) people their day in the office resembles drinking from a fire hose. 

Not only do they need to attend a large number of meetings (often back to back), they are also hit with a continuous stream of ad-hoc questions from their staff, peers, customers, and line managers, which require their attention and action.

Technical tools like time management training and productivity tools do not address the issue.  What is required is a radical new way to set your priorities in the workplace.

If you read social media postings, business magazines, and reports from consulting firms, it is easy to get the impression that one of the biggest problems organizations are wrestling with is, is incorporating millennials into the workplace.

In this episode, we will see, on the basis of studies by academics and some of the best-known companies in the world, that there is no need for companies to treat Millennials and 'non-Millennials' any different.

During COVID-19 the demand for leadership development does not seem to have decreased; if anything, the demand seems to have increased. That is remarkable. During the financial crisis in 2007-2008 for instance, most companies almost immediately reduced their out-of-pocket costs associated with these activities.

The fact that companies do not seem to save on developing their leaders is a good thing. First of all because the quality of leadership has a tangible and measurable impact on business results. Secondly because there is evidence that leadership roles have become more demanding in the last couple of decade, especially for first, and second-level leaders in organizations.

Therefore business leaders should not leave the development of their leaders to chance, but take a pro-active stance.

#leaderhip #leadershipdevelopement #vucaleadership #covid19 #humanity #purpose #virtualworking #coaching #leadershipstyle #diversityandinclusion

2021 promises to be a very interesting year! If all prognoses are correct, sometime in the next six months we should have developed a grip on COVID19. Here is my (strictly personal and highly selective) take on the workplace in 2021. Three trends and three implications for you. I wish you a happy and prosperous 2021!