Posted by Oliver Nyumbu
October 19th, 2007 | 1 Comment »
For business leaders, communication is really important. It can also be hideously difficult to 
get right. It was for this reason that the Heath brothers’ book, Made to Stick, piqued my interest.
Posted by Nick Booth
September 13th, 2007 | No Comments »
“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle [because] we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue.”
George Orwell 1946.
Hat tip Andrew Sullivan.
Posted by Oliver Nyumbu
May 30th, 2007 | 2 Comments »
“When there’s a gap between someone doing her job and doing the right thing, then management has failed”.
Posted by Nick Booth
May 20th, 2007 | 1 Comment »
“Institutional Hack” is a delicious, contradictory new phrase for me. Paul Miller (of the School of Everything and from time to time the think tank Demos) used it earlier today in this post on his personal blog. At first you might think an Institutional Hack is one of those cynical folk, the type whose skill, energy and expertise is focused on working the politics of their organisation principally for personal gain. Not so.
Posted by Oliver Nyumbu
March 7th, 2007 | 1 Comment »
“In a time of drastic change it is the learners who inherit the future. The learned usually find themselves equipped to live in a world that no longer exists”. These words of Eric Hoffner , the American Social Writer, suggest an important challenge for anyone in leadership. It is the challenge of going beyond being learned to remaining a learner for life.
Posted by Oliver Nyumbu
February 26th, 2007 | No Comments »
No I am not swearing. Honest! “The No Asshole Rule” is actually the title of a new wonderful boo
k by someone I really rate. The person is Robert Sutton who is a professor of management science at Stanford University where he collaborates with Dave Ulrich.
Posted by Oliver Nyumbu
February 22nd, 2007 | 1 Comment »
Today BT delivered customer service that truly surprised me. You see, my phone at home has not been working for the past four days and I thought it was due to faulty hand sets. Last night, I phoned BT to establish whether the fault might have anything to do with BT equipment.
Posted by Oliver Nyumbu
February 16th, 2007 | No Comments »
To be a really useless leader is not terribly difficult. Stephen Sonsino (a fellow of the Centre for Management Development, London Business School) has done some interesting research into what really useless leaders do:
Posted by Oliver Nyumbu
January 24th, 2007 | No Comments »
Last week, on a trip to Norway, I had the joy of meeting and travelling with Franz Muller who is Managing Director for Reader’s Digest Nordic. Turns out that he is a really shrewd operator where it comes to managing knowledge workers for sustained productivity.
Posted by Oliver Nyumbu
November 27th, 2006 | No Comments »
Some of the meetings I have had with top teams have left me wondering about the prevalence of substandard listening. Indeed, as Edward De Bono puts it,
‘Very few people are good listeners. A good listener listens slowly to what is being said. He does not jump ahead nor does he rush to judge nor does he sit there formulating his own reply. He focuses directly on what is being said. He listens to more than is being said. He extracts the maximum information from what he hears by looking between the words used and wondering why something has been expressed in a particular way. It is active listening…’
