Category: Executive Governance

UK senior leaders with a genuine concern for long-term sustainable value will not be surprised to find boardroom discussion being dominated by strategy considerations in the next few weeks. Not just because access to European markets is uncertain but because globalisation offers interesting opportunities. Boardrooms are often referent to their organisation’s concept of ‘the strategic’.…

I thought it worthwhile capturing the sensations leaders and managers are experiencing when considering purpose and direction. And express this outside of our normal functional language-set, drawing from the late and I believe great Zygmunt Bauman, the Leeds-based sociologist. Does this seem plausible to say that the modern purposeful nature of global management in late-modernity…

Micro-analysis on the BREXIT deal is obscuring the long-view of the UK’s eventual place in the new world-order. This podcast invites a very confident view from history. Past withdrawals from European power invited interesting equilibrium-seeking leadership. Via media, or the middle-way, became something of the English genius. The ability to please our European markets and hunt down…

Leadership in contemporary organisations is dominated by the language of function. Largely as organisations have evolved to privilege the functional behaviours of its members. Unsurprising given the globalising of modern society. And modern societies often prefer speech rooted in events and people over and above the apparent abstractness of ideas or imagining. That we are…

“We can easily identify the several organs, including blood vessels… but their mutual relation inside the body can be grasped only by a sustained effort of the imagination,” offered Michael Polanyi. Polanyi was a polymath who moved between hard science and the mysteries of knowing. Some forms of knowledge are only revealed aesthetically, through sustained…

Or to be precise 12 Angry Men, one of the finest Hollywood offerings – the 1957 version of course; and the outstanding Lee J Cobb, whose character (Juror No. 3) explodes his way to the film’s denouement: “You lousy bunch of bleeding hearts!” Yes simplistic but nevertheless revealing that our most powerful driver of change…