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Business and organisational development news views and insights from Prospero Barn.
Recent Posts Tagged With 'change'
Changing Your Organisation - Recession Or Not
Assuming you’ve already made the critical changes required for your organisation to survive, the next challenge is how should you change your organisation to thrive?Different approaches are being deployed; some organisations believing any further c...
Pragmatism Or A Lack Of Integrity?
Your organisation needs to change shape, whether that’s due to economic circumstances or because of a change of strategy. This can mean cutting back on the work force. In such circumstances, how do you approach redundancy issues?This article isnâ€...
Change – Sticking With It
Change programmes fail far too often. In response organisations spend plenty of time planning the change (a sensible idea), launching it, communicating it (another must do), but still find themselves losing enthusiasm when the excitement of the new ...
Where Are Your Bags Going On Holiday?
Heathrow Terminal Five seems to have settled down a little and long haul flights are easing their way in. Passengers however are still nervous and planes are full of extra hand baggage ‘just in case’ bags are lost or make their way to an altogeth...
Management Competence
BackgroundOver the past decade, there have been widespread changes in the political, social, economic and psychological forces affecting organisations and their people.These changes have significantly affected both the nature of management and the st...
Everything Has To Change, Even Rocks
Twelve months ago managers and employees at Northern Rock could not have envisioned the situation they find themselves in this week. Working in an organisation with an aggressive growth strategy, happy customers and confident investors they did feel...
What We’re Playing: The Making of The President
Title: The Making of The PresidentPublisher: Z-Man GamesPrice: $44.99Reviewer: Claudine McCleanThe United States Presidential election doesn’t happen until November, but with the most interesting primary season for decades it looks set to be a fasc...
Transformational Leadership – Unlocking Leadership Potential Across Your Organisation
Organisations are now in a permanently turbulent change state, the days of the status quo are over. Transformational leadership is the most effective response; it effectively positions you for the future and increases your capacity to deal with the c...
What We’re Playing - Canal Mania
Current concerns about how to reduce carbon emissions, combined with worries about how to ensure that the Olympic park is ready for London 2012 without bringing the capital to a standstill have led to a renewed interest in Britain’s waterways.Cana...
Making Personal Change
People live with change constantly: in a lifetime, everyone goes through personal transformation from infancy to adolescence, young adulthood, middle age and finally old age. A career path may lead from subordinate to junior management, middle manage...
Eleven Business/People Orthodoxies – Where Do You Stand?
Command & Control Management Style. Management gurus and business schools have for 20 years been saying the modern organisation needs to be run on different lines, so why, apart from some notable exceptions (which tend to be start-ups), is it so...
What Kind Of Change Manager Are You?
There are two kinds of manager trying to make sense of change. The first is whom we might call The Yes But Manager, the second the Yes And Manager.The Yes But Manager sees their primary function as twofold. To minimise risks to the business and to m...
Like A Rock
The last couple of weeks have seen unprecedented behaviour in the UK banking sector. Banks seem nervous of lending to each other, and commentators struggle to explain LIBOR, SIVs and US sub prime activity. Rumours abound and banking share prices ha...
Games We’re Playing - Pillars Of The Earth
Pillars of the Earth is a cathedral building game, based on the novel by Ken Follett. With restricted resources, employees and choices, and the constant challenge from competitors with the same aims as you it’s an interesting mediaeval parallel to...
The Differences Between Traditional and Enterprise Wide Selling
This month we thought a table you can print out and take to the beach could act as a provocative thought starter. We were asked by a client to look at what change would be involved in moving from a vertical, functionally focused sales approach where...
The Evolution Of Performance
Businesses are all looking for the perfect performance management systems, either looking for the ultimate process, the ideal software or the most elegant paperwork.Unfortunately, developing each of those takes time, and can result in a constant loop...
Transformational Leadership - Unlocking Leadership Potential Across Your Organisation
Organisations are now in a permanently turbulent change state, the days of the status quo are over. Transformational leadership is the most effective response; it effectively positions you for the future and increases your capacity to deal with the c...
So…You Would Call Yourself A Sales Leader?
To find out answer these questions:Your company has just been taken over by a larger concern. The performance of your sales team has dropped and some are looking for other jobs. You know that they are looking to you for leadership.Re-organise the t...
The Trend Continues - (Some) Field Salespeople Are an Endangered Species
It should come as no surprise to read last weeks announcement that the pharma giant Merck is planning to lay-off a large part of its salesforce. Saying that they can create more sales momentum from other channels such as product marketing, brands and...
The End Of The Neophobes
Rats are neophobes. If you happen to have a rat problem, and want a humane and organic, if not altogether neighbourly, solution, it pays to play on this. Disrupting a rat's routine, by steps as simple as identifying a daily route and placing a diff...
Managing Change
Change is a day-to-day reality for organisations. In order to succeed they have to be able to adapt. But there's no single model of change and no single solution to managing it effectively. Many kinds of organisational change occur, for example, cult...
Business Change Phases - A Three Card Trick (the trick is knowing the different challenges they each pose!)
When a business is going through business change it needs a high degree of awareness of the context it finds itself in. Change does not happen in a vacuum, things have led up to the change and things will follow. The trick relates to being aware of y...
Ten Strategy Thought Starters
Strategy definition: Creating distinctive, sustainable competitive advantage. Not difficult to articulate but for many organisations difficult to do well.Distinctive means being discriminatory, rejecting options, not doing everything, focus, focus, f...
