I was recently given a review copy of Andrew Rixon’s new book, Opening Up: Creative Storytelling at Work. Andrew is an expert in applying complexity theory and storytelling within organisations to facilitate consensus and change. One of the intriguing contributions of this book is Andrew’s idea of organisational fairy tales. By constructing a fairy tale…
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I have recently been reading Ken Fisher’s book The Ten Roads to Riches and enjoying and learning a thing or two from it. Ken should know a thing or two about riches: as founder and chairman of Fisher Investments, he manages around $45 Billion of other people’s assets – and gets to talk to a lot…
A colleague of mine commented recently that one of his tests when presenting powerful ideas to business audiences was to see if his 5 year old daughter could understand it. If it passed that test, then the idea was probably simple and powerful enough to be communicated effectively in a keynote presentation or workshop for…
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Over the Christmas break, I had the chance to read Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book, Outliers: The Story of Success. In a nutshell, Gladwell argues that extreme individual success – the success of people who are “outliers” in terms of performance and outcomes – is not due to levels of IQ or what specifically they are…
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As his website states, Edward De Bono is regarded by many as a “leading authority in the world in the field of creative thinking and the direct teaching of thinking as a skill.” De Bono has “written 62 books with translations into 37 languages and has been invited to lecture in 54 countries.” De Bono…
John P. Kotter is a leading author and authority in Change Management. This article is a review of Kotter’s excellent work on the management of change outlined in his books Leading Change and The Heart of Change (with Dan Cohen). I will first summarise Kotter’s model of change in these books, and then assess Kotter’s…
The modern professional world seems set up, by and large, to favour people with specific training and qualifications who have focused on and gained practical skills in a particular professional area and who stay in that area for an extended period of time demonstrating and deepening that skills base. This is the case for a…
One of the ‘classic’ texts on Change Management is Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change by William Bridges, originally published in 1991 and last updated in 2003. In this review, I provide an overview of the framework, and make a critical assessment of its strengths and weaknesses. Overview of the Framework The starting point…
Recently I posted a review of Malcolm Gladwell’s bestseller The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference , where Gladwell argued that ‘stickiness’ is a vitally important aspect of ideas becoming ‘contagious’ and spreading like viruses. I’ve recently been reading with interest Chip Heath and Dan Heath’s recently published book Made to…
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See Review Part I – Introduction, central ideas of the Tipping Point See Review Part II – were Gladwell’s Tipping Point ideas original? Exactly what kind of argument was Gladwell putting forward in his Tipping Point? In the introduction to The Tipping Point , Gladwell asserts that: The Tipping Point is the biography of an…
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