To Survive The Unexpected Step2: The World as it Goes Let’s take a deeper look at the uncertainty that next generation leaders will be confronting and make some hypotheses about what that means for leading successfully in that new context. Five factors are the most relevant here: the power of digitalization; what the global grid […]

To Survive The Unexpected Over the past five years, ICM associates has been working on organizational resilience around a simple idea: survive the unexpected. We saw this unexpected in a few trends: the digital revolution, the transformation of industrial sectors, an increasingly strong globalization, the ecological issues, but we never imagined that the world would […]

In a minute or two of trawling around LinkedIn you will be amazed at the great men who all sing the praises of failure: from Churchill to Michael Jordan; from Kennedy to Henry Ford; from James Joyce to Abraham Lincoln. On the other hand, you won’t read much about Joe Dorn, a baker in Pocatello, […]

When I open the paper, here’s what I read: Volkswagen is surreptitiously warming the planet. HSBC is laundering money from dubious sources. Servier is making money off of a health risk. The Carlton offers room service that goes way beyond the mini-bar. A minister, self-styled tax-avoiding Savanarola, proves to be overly fond of Swiss and […]

The Europe of past centuries knew all about cementing alliances. Royalty and nobility married their children into one another’s families. Love had little to do with it compared to the political challenges and the future of peoples who were all too often at war. The goal was peace: durable, fruitful peace between heretofore enemies. Sometimes […]

We remember the sixties as a time of major worldwide controversies and changes. Eastern Europe had its Iron Curtain; Vietnam was caught in an endless war. In America people were battling for civil rights; France was giving up its African colonies. And in Nanterre it was finally legal for boys to go into the girls’ […]

La Fontaine wrong? You’ve got to be kidding! We all know the tragic ending of the frog that wanted to be bigger than an ox. It swelled and swelled thanks to to thoughtless ambitions until it simply exploded. But what happens when an ox wants to be as agile as a frog? Can you really […]

There’s nothing more “in” than “corporate DNA”. Which only goes to show that people are ready to buy any old metaphor wholesale. It’s as though before having been “birthed”, corporate culture had already begun to develop in the genes of those who “conceived” it. But this is only partially true and it’s partially worrisome. It’s […]

“So you’re going to give ballet lessons??” This is what a French executive asked me in the late eighties. I was trying to convince him to pay attention to his company culture as he thought about how to implement the organization change he had initiated. I should have answered yes, because when it comes right […]

It’s obvious to everyone that the digital revolution represents a total paradigm change. We’ve gone from the civilization of the written word to the age of code; from the word to the icon; from the pyramid to the network; from verticality to horizontality. This is so overwhelming that for the moment no one can fully […]