Versatile Amphibian

“We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like "I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive..." And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas.” Hunter S Thompson, Fear & Loathing In Las Vegas Since the earliest days of human civilisation, people have used narcotics to escape everyday life and enter new and exhilarating worlds. Narcotics alter our perception of the world b y altering human brain and body chemistry . We feel things as real that we would otherwise unconsciously dismiss as impossible. Despite the richness and depth of the experience that narcotics offer, our inability to accurately control, shape or share the hallucination make them an unreliable tool to create an alternative reality on ...

  “Defense network computers. New... powerful... hooked into everything, trusted to run it all. They say it got smart, a new order of intelligence. Then it saw all people as a threat, not just the ones on the other side. Decided our fate in a microsecond: extermination.” Kyle Reese, The Terminator One of the common criticisms of executive teams that fail to achieve good outcomes is that they failed to see a problem that later crippled their organisation. Built into this criticism is an implicit assumption that executives can both see everything to which their organisation is exposed and can understand that data point in the context of every other one. Hindsight is a fine thing. Executive teams are not like Skynet’s CPU. They are collections of human beings and subject to human failings. It is, however, somewhat useful to imagine the executive team as a processor, sitting at the centre of an information system. This information system is built to an information architecture, which g...

A few years ago a friend of mine asked me if I had any thoughts about a leadership team restructure he was contemplating. Instinctively I knew that I must have thoughts, after all, I’ve dedicated a big chunk of my 15-year professional career to helping executives set their strategies. Surely I must have some pithy advice on how to put those executives together into some kind of coherent order? But I was stumped. And it turned out that I wasn’t alone. A magical mystery tour through my smartest colleagues turned up a few rules of thumb, but little in the way of theory. So I did what all management consultants do and turned to Google and HBR. Here again, I drew a blank. Although I found many interesting articles and opinions about aspects of executive leadership and governance, I failed to turn up anything seminal about structure and practices. Hell, I failed to turn up anything conceptual, let alone Executive Team Configuration For Dummies. That was late 2018. After a short intermission ...