Companies are removing people this year to capture a productivity gain that, on their own account, has not arrived. Read that twice. Both halves are documented. The Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis ran about 490,000 earnings call transcripts from 5,198 publicly traded US firms to see how
There is a sentence in systems literature that removes your right to complain about your own organisation. David Peter Stroh states it plainly in Systems Thinking for Social Change: systems are perfectly designed to achieve the results they are currently achieving. No matter how dysfunctional a system appears to be,
1 Arthur Wren had stopped looking at himself in mirrors around the time other people stopped looking at him. He placed that somewhere in his early sixties, well before Maggie got sick. So he could not blame it on the grief. It was an arrangement that suited everyone. He shaved
Most organisations adopting OKRs today are using a tool built for engineering teams to solve problems that are not engineering problems. The framework works. It often works very well. It does not work everywhere. I spent the first part of my career as an internal auditor, and one of the
A few years ago I wrote here that better leadership, on its own, will not save us. I was deep into Cal Newport's A World Without Email at the time, and the book had me convinced of one thing: most of what we treat as a leadership problem
In 2024 we spent over three weeks clearing out my father's house. My father was, at the end of his life, a hoarder. Every cupboard was full. Every drawer was full. The cellar was so full that we didn’t even start emptying it, leaving it all to
Most government AI programmes are designed to fail. Not by intent, but by instinct. When a public organisation decides to build an AI initiative, it does what public organisations always do with new things they do not fully understand: it builds controls around them. Governance committees. Approval gates. Reporting requirements.
Stream of Consciousness
This is a fork of the excellent document written bij Michael Lopp, aka Rands in Repose, which you can find here. It is titled “How to … Rands”, and the credit for the idea and a lot of the content is entirely his. The article is a sort of introduction on
note taking
I love cursive writing. I always have. I was born into a generation that still had cursive writing drilled into them in school, and it is a great way to express your ideas, thoughts, and feelings at human speed. There is also a very tangible aspect to it: I have
Stream of Consciousness
Laurence Tratt wrote this interesting article on his blog two days ago. "Choosing what to read" as an article is more than worth your time reading it. It talks about making the best reading and opinion influencing choices in a world where we get overwhelmed with articles about
Stream of Consciousness
Stream of Consciousness
I'm getting deep into "A world without email", the new book by Cal Newport. Excellent read and in terms of insight eye-opening. If you want science supported insights into what works and does not in the workplace, this should be among the books you read