As the novelist, who knows the nightmare of facing, without the slightest inspiration, a desperately white sheet for hours, the business leader sometimes fears this Moment of Truth, when he will have to engage his organization in an apparently dull, unspectacular but necessary challenge. That is why HSE, sustainability, compliance, risk, quality, excellence, innovation, diversity and others often remain buzzwords,…

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Recently, I saw been delivered a fascinating session explaining to business executives, how professional troops were operating, under extreme conditions, when disruption and unexpected changes were the rules of the game. The speaker, Michael Newman, explained that under such conditions, the old “Command & Control” was totally inefficient and illusory, given the fact that people in operations needed to react…

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In our network, we count 9 wemen (out of 35), 1 Algerian, 4 Americans, 1 Australian, 3 Belgians, 5 Brazilians, 7 British, 3 Canadians, 1 Congolese, 1 Dutch, 9 French, 1 German, 1 Lebanese, 1 Swede, 3 Swiss (yes it counts more than 35 as we have double nationals) and we are based in Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, France, Honk-Kong,…

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In the recent months, still positively influenced by Nokia’s “Connecting People” way of life and belief, I happened to match executives needing to change horizon with clients looking for the rare bird. And it seems to have been happy marriages. In each of the cases, our clients informally had turned to us, as they were unimpressed by the solution or…

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Merging or acquiring are two highly risky decisions to take. Following several consultancies, the proportion of such operations, failing to deliver on their promises, is around 70%. Why do we get it so wrong? A paper, to which some of us contributed, brought interesting ideas forward: Jeffrey Krug in a 2009 HBR article pointed out that “The managers in charge…

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