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, […]

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 […]

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 […]