The Importance of Undisciplined Thinking

“This course made me realize that there are two ways to view myself and my life: From the outside looking in (how others see me), and from the inside looking out (how I see myself). Now that I’m aware of these two perspectives, I think about everything differently.”

What discipline solicited such a thoughtful, life-changing reaction from an undergraduate?

Psychology? Religion? Philosophy?

None of the above. It was managerial accounting.

The Dark Side of Goal-Setting

How many of you are sick of discussing the importance of setting goals?

Goal-setting has become a personal, corporate and political fetish. Modern workers are frequently subjected to performance reviews in which they must set themselves goals to work towards. The fact that these targets are frequently idiotic or meaningless seems to be irrelevant.

There are, however, some good ways to set goals and align them with your personal strategy.

How Creative Is Your Team?

Are you creative? Try this simple test…

The well-known known illusion above can be seen in two ways: as both a duck and a rabbit. Which do you see first? And if you see one, can you also see the other?

Most people see the duck first and can flip between the two representations, but the question is: how easy is it for you to flip between them? Does it require real mental strain, or can you do it at will?

Wiseman et al. (2011) had a hunch that the ability to flip between representations is related to creativity.

Why Organizations Secretly Fear Creative Ideas

Why are creative ideas often rejected in favour of conformity and uniformity?

Does society really value creativity? People say they want more creative people, more creative ideas and solutions, but do they really?

For all the talk of creativity in business, industry and academia, there’s evidence that it’s implicitly discouraged in these areas as well. Although leaders of organisations say they want creative ideas, the evidence suggests creativity gets rejected in favour of conformity and uniformity (Staw, 1995 cited in Mueller et al., 2011).

Can Finance Have a Seat at the Strategy Table? Not Without Change, New Survey Reveals.

A NEW CFO PRIORITY: TALENT DEVELOPMENT WITH A FOCUS ON SOFT SKILLS In previous years, the finance function sat mostly on its own and “crunched the numbers” without having much input into daily operations or long term strategy. However, the finance role has evolved to one that needs to provide sharp and meaningful analyses to…

6 Ways to Kill Creativity

Want your organisation to perform poorly? Here are six ways to kill creativity in business, or anywhere.

Many organisations claim they want to foster creativity—and so they should—but unintentionally, through their working practices, creativity is killed stone dead.

That’s what Teresa Amabile, now Director of the Harvard Business School, found when looking back over decades of her research in organisations (Amabile, 1998). As part of one research program she examined seven companies in three different industries, having team members report back daily on their work.

After two years she found marked differences in how organisations dealt with creativity.

Continuous Strategy Planning

There is nothing complex in [the budgeting] process. It is logical, makes sense and should be straightforward. But personal experience and various surveys show that this isn’t the case. In the Harvard Business Review article ‘Turning great strategy into great performance’, only 50 - 60% of the potential within a strategic plan is ever realised with the top reasons for failure being inadequate resources, poor communication, and actions required to execute not being clearly defined. It goes on to say that the cause of this failure is laid squarely on breakdowns in the planning and execution process.

So what’s going wrong and what can be done to put it right?

Do Less (or, Why Managers Should Stop Micromanaging and Trust Their Employees)

In looking at the great leaders of history—whether they are political leaders like Julius Caesar or business leaders like Steven P. Jobs—many people probably assume that they must have taken a particularly active role in running their organizations. Caesar, after all, personally led his troops into Gaul, and Jobs was famous for checking the design of even the smallest inner workings of every product at Apple.

“Most leaders do too much,” Murnighan says. “And when they do, they’re seen as micromanagers.”