Getting Things Done
It's been too long since I've posted a blog entry. Between work and adapting the curriculum of a venerable training program in my new role as academic director, there were not too many words left in my head or fingers. The juggling of multiple projects and
audit academy
Thinking about corporate governance When we think about corporate governance, most if us think about a large and quite often unwieldy set of organisational structures and processes which keep the organisation aligned and on course towards its explicit objectives. And that is what governance has been portrayed as ... An immovable
Stream of Consciousness
Failing to bring home the goods I believe most of us have been in a situation such as the following: we send out a young staff member on an interview, most often one of their first, only to have them come back with less than the information we expected them
Stream of Consciousness
Working on efficiency We've been working a lot on efficiency aspects lately, so I got to thinking about the boundaries of efficiency quite a lot in recent days and weeks. Efficiency is very important, especially in a public sector environment. We are using taxpayers' money, so it
Stream of Consciousness
Development aid is not about punishing people. Not our own people, not our beneficiaries. It should never be about guilt, or about a debt owed. It should be about using our intelligence, our creativity, to make the world more inclusive. It should never be about the typical Catholic rap of:
internal audit
There is a old "new" management wave roaring through the organisational straights again, and it is lapping up on the shores of public administrations. I'm talking about the workplace democracy model that was made famous by the success of Brazil based Semco in the 1990'
Stream of Consciousness
Turtles all the way There's this story I must have read in one of Terry Pratchett's wonderful diskworld novels. In a conference open to the public, a scientist is approached by an older lady. She contests the round world hypothesis and points out that the world
Getting Things Done
Alcoholism and opium As I understand from my sparse reading of the history of the beginning of the last century - the history of the industrial revolution - many people were left at a loss what to do with their lives once the industrialisation took hold. This led to for example a
Getting Things Done
The approaches ... There is GTD, and 7 habits, and scrum, and many more approaches, for lack of a better word, which aim to help us with our personal productivity. I for one started with 7 habits and graduated to a personal adaptation of GTD with some agile put in there
audit academy
In the short period of 1999 to 2003, the Belgian federal government was making some real progress, at least conceptually, in improving its functioning. The Copernicus reform, which eventually failed, had some essential ideas on how to turn the Belgian federal public sector into a (reasonably) lean organisation. Come the
Getting Things Done
Two books I've read in recent months made me acutely aware of my bad time travel habits. I know, it may come as a shock I can travel through time. It most certainly surprised me. You may believe it's a gift, but it is really more
internal audit
The contract killer I've known quite a few internal auditors who took pride in the number of people they managed to take out as a consequence of their audit reports. The arguments? Most often they argued the people had failed to do what they were told to do