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, […]

Irene Rodgers     &     Deepa Natarajan It’s 3:15 in the morning and you’re awake and anxious. “Yes, that project is totally unrealistic and it’s sabotaging my days” you say to yourself. You twist and turn. Eyes wide open you tell yourself the night is over for you and that if you fall […]

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 […]

“I want to have at least some control over what I do and where I do it!” “How in the world do I fit into the big picture?” “I don’t even have the freedom to do what I’m supposed to do!” Isn’t this what the people in our organizations are demanding from their companies today […]

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 […]

A quoi donc doivent ressembler les leaders de demain? Bonne question. Et beaucoup de nos clients se la posent. Confrontés à la complexité, la diversité, à l’incertitude grandissantes du monde actuel et au changement de génération, ils s’interrogent sur ce qui pourrait contribuer à bâtir un socle culturel solide et cohérent. Et quoi de plus […]

At the heart of the future… I invited Melissa, a senior expert from an international high technology company, to dinner four months ago. I’d always thought it was exciting to be at the heart of something that could make the difference in our developed countries: not economies of scale, not doing more with less, but […]

Do you remember how at the end of 2009 those who predicted the crisis would be over by the end 2010 were attacked as “pessimists” and “negative thinkers”? And now, here we are in the beginning 2013 and everybody now knows that “crisis” is probably a misnomer because whatever it is, it’s here to stay. […]

Three months ago I had dinner with my friend Joan. She seemed pretty depressed. Since she had recently taken a CIO position in a global organization, I thought it probably had something to do with her engagement and frequent travels. But I was wrong. “It’s always the same story” she told me. “At the end […]

One o’clock in the morning. The crowd thinned out from the bar. I was putting my sax back in its box, after a few hours of jamming with the band, and it suddenly struck my mind how similar my musician and my consulting life can be (although with jazz, you get to bed later!). As […]