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Management Innovation: The Imperative for a Unified Approach to Systemic Change

Management Innovation refers to the introduction of significant changes in how organizations manage and organize themselves, including their corporate structure, processes, and practices, to enhance overall performance and adaptability and create sustainable competitive advantage. Unlike technological or product innovations, management innovations focus

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Bridging Divides: The Choice between Fragmentation and Integration

In the tapestry of organizational life, the threads of various departments weave together to form the fabric of a company. Yet, within this interlacing, a pivotal choice exists—one that can either fortify the fabric with strength and cohesion or unravel it into

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Transitioning to a Distributed Leadership Model for Resilience and Innovation

Transitioning from a singular leadership structure to a distributed leadership model involves a strategic shift in how leadership roles and responsibilities are conceptualized and implemented within an organization. This transition is rooted in the understanding that the complexities and rapid changes in

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Building Future Resiliency

If anything is resonating worldwide, not in the least due to the fallout of the recent pandemic, it is about having or building resiliency. As an individual, resilience is the capacity to cope with life’s challenges and bounce back from hardship. People

Interview: Healing Broken Systems

Last month, Edwin Korver, founder and CEO of CROSS-SILO, was interviewed by Dr. Madelyn Blair, a former World Bank executive, in her show on the practice of resilient leadership, named Unlocked, after her book, to talk about the poor state of our human

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Whole System Positive Change

We’ve spent almost seven years designing the ROUNDMAP™ Whole System Model of Business in an attempt to overcome widespread employee disengagement and alienation. Unfortunately, due to functional and mental silos, internal politics and turf wars, our holistic approach wasn’t received with open

The Course of Action: Know When to Turn

While briefly considering taking an online short course at MIT Sloan, Leadership in an Exponentially Changing World, I realized that any course of action taking by leadership during times of great volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (known as VUCA) comes at a

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Lifecycle of Positive Change™

We’re a strong advocate of Positive Change. However, we noticed that the 4-D cycle (right), used in Appreciative Inquiry (A) interventions, may have an image problem. The first stage, the Discovery, captures everyone’s imagination, but once we discuss the Dream, top executives

Introducing Change Onward!

In our experience, dealing with large-scale change initiatives, meaningful change can only be achieved by involving the whole system in the process while embracing feedback from all stakeholders as a potential for learning and evolving. To cut the story short, we call

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Beware The Great Deluge

As you may have read on our website ROUNDMAP.com, we’ve been quite outspoken on the subject of business cycles ─ in particular, the technology-driven Kondratieff Longwave Cycle or K-wave. Arguably, the 5th K-wave is expected to bottom out around 2024. This means

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Grandmaster of Business Award™ 2021

We are honored to introduce our nominee for the first Grandmaster of Business Award™, 2021. But before we present our acclaimed nominee, we would like to explain more about the Grandmaster of Business™, the Award, and its decoration. Demand for the Grandmasters of

The Formula for Change (Gleicher)

During our research, we stumbled upon an interesting concept: a formula for change. It was promoted by Dick Beckhard (Organizational Transitions, 1977) and Reuben Harris while attributing its creation to David Gleicher. While David Gleicher did propose an earlier version of the formula,

Boundaries

Crossing Boundaries during Times of Transformative Change

Boundaries help us define and control the space that we’re in or like to investigate, however, boundaries also confine us, telling us how to behave, what to consider, and moreover, what to ignore. When we’re in a state of crisis, these (self-)imposed

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Elon Musk: MBAs stifle innovation

Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk says the biggest problem with corporate America today is that too many business school graduates are running the show. “I think that there might be too many MBAs running companies,” Musk said Tuesday at the WSJ CEO

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Why 97% of People Are Wrong About Almost Everything

Why do most people respond poorly, even to the point of ignorance, to situations that require immediate change? Paul Rulkens, a business consultant of KPMG, had moved his focus from chemical engineering to the fascinating field of high performance. His work is

Comfort Zone

Crossing the chasm between creativity and innovation

In short: The problem with innovation isn’t that people aren’t creative. Most people are. However, very few creative initiatives are worth turning it into an innovation. The challenge is to steer the entire creative process in the right direction and then select

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Preparing the Stage for the Grandmaster of Business™

While we’re preparing the stage for the Grandmaster of Business™, you may be aware that since 1970, in the game of chess, a Grandmaster has been the highest title a chess player can attain. Once achieved, the title is generally held for

The Wheel of Fortitude – The Comfort Zone Revisited

Most readers will be familiar with the concept of ‘being in a comfort zone while growth requires one to dare to go beyond our comfort zone by facing our panic and fears. Bardwick defines a comfort zone as “a behavioral state where a

Autonomy versus Authority

Should leadership distribute authority and provide teams with a high level of autonomy to innovate, or should it centralize authority to prevent a proliferation of products and markets. The debate seems to be shifting toward distributed authority, however, what about SONY? The

ROUNDMAP-Conflict

About being right, or getting it right!

Dr. Brené Brown shared a most insightful mantra on Linkedin that we believe most of us can learn a lot from ─ we certainly do: Dr. Brené Brown is a research professor at the University of Houston where she holds the Huffington

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IBM’s Business Transformation

In 1993, IBM posted the biggest loss ever-recorded in corporate history, 8 billion USD. To survive, it needed to be restructured and undergo a full-fledged transformation. Bridget van Kralingen, general manager for IBM North America, explained: We had missed a number of

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Remove the functional blinders!

Harvard lecturer and global trend watcher Vikram Mansharamani wrote in his most recent book Think for Yourself: “The world, to put it bluntly, has changed, but our philosophy around skills development has not. It’s time to rethink our love affair with depth.

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Change is not Transformational

When people write that you should ‘transform your business’, what they mean to say is: You should digitalize your business to remain competitive and to meet the expectations of your users. However, that is not a transformation. It is change. According to

https://go.forrester.com/blogs/predictions-2020-customer-experience/

Forrester: 25% of CX Profs Ousted in 2020

An article on Forbes, by Adrian Swinscoe, starts with, “Many Customer Experience (CX) initiatives and projects are currently failing to meet the expectations of both customers and businesses.”. That is, as acknowledged by Adrian, not news. Indeed, according to an article on

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The end of shareholder-first?

In 1962, Nobel prize-winning economist Milton Friedman wrote in his book Capitalism and Freedom, “There is one and only one social responsibility of business ─ to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits [..]”. Many years later,

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The Adaptability Quotient (AQ)

Whether a startup has the potential to become a success very much depends on its founder(s). To assess the leadership of a startup most investors tend to assess their IQ (intellectual intelligence) while others prefer to test their EQ (emotional intelligence). Natalie

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Psychological Safety

Research by Google and others confirmed that the best performing team didn’t deliver because of talent, resources, or money. Out of 250 factors that were examined, the common denominator for outstanding teams was psychological safety. Those that lacked it, didn’t do so

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Silos, Politics and Turf Wars

New York Times best-selling author and acclaimed management expert Patrick Lencioni addresses the costly and maddening issue of silos, the barriers that create organizational politics. According to Lencioni, silos devastate organizations, kill productivity, push good people out the door, and jeopardize the

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The Silo Effect by Gillian Tett

In her book, The Silo Effect, FT journalist and antropologist Gillian Tett describes the destructive effects that mental, structural, and data silos have on collaboration, innovation and performance. However, it becomes mind-boggling when you put a number to the damages caused. Gillian