Category: leadership
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Why systems beat goals
When I wrote my first book about agility and business transformation I wrote about the idea that in leading change, systems beat goals. It’s a principle that I keep coming back to, both in my transformation work with businesses and in a personal context
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AI Transformation and ROI: Bottom-up trap, top-down fantasy
Last week I was asked to take part in a Cambridge Judge Business School panel on AI transformation. It was a pretty wide ranging discussion but there was a useful lens on this given by the latest McKinsey State of AI 2025 report which
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Transforming systems and thinking differently
I once did a fascinating project with the operations team of a big pharma business helping them to understand how they could combine agile ways of working with Lean manufacturing techniques. As part of the research for it I did a dive
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Gigantomania and why big projects go wrong
This weeks news about the further delays and overspend costs associated with the UK’s HS2 high-speed rail project had a distinct air of inevitability about it. Government infrastructure initiatives and large corporate projects that don’t overrun and exceed budget are a unique kind
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Superagency: Amplifying Human Capability with AI
There’s something very attractive about the idea of ‘superagency’, the emerging concept that sits at the intersection of AI, organisational design, and talent. It refers to the amplification of individual or team capability through AI, allowing people to operate with outsized influence,
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AI, and inflection points in the creative industry
AI has generated a real inflection point for every sector that involves/uses/hires creative thinking and talent. For many creative businesses it can easily feel as though they are facing an unprecedented level of uncertainty or even an existential threat. I’m doing a
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On Changing the System
I wouldn’t call myself an ardent football fan but I am a fan of exceptional innovations and innovators from the world of sport and how they help us to challenge our own thinking. The other day I was talking to a client
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Decoding the real value of AI
When it comes to developing a strategy for AI implementation there seems to be a lot of rabbits in a lot of headlights right now. How do you make sense of all the potential that AI brings to so many areas of
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Innovating employee experience in the age of AI
I was lucky enough to give the keynote at the CIPD Change Management conference the other week and one of the speakers there referenced how they’d used change personas to help deal with the variety of different responses to a change initiative.
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Winning the race before it starts
I featured a case study in my most recent newsletter which focused on the theme of changing how the game is played – learning from sports, culture and business examples where the protagonist had flipped the script to rethink norms and gain