This post is the first of my #100DaysToOffload. The concept, kicked off by Kev Quirk, is simple: to write on your personal blog every day for 100 days.
I am looking forward to the one hundred days challenge, and a challenge it will be, because my most recent writing efforts and current researches are months if not years in the gestation and in consequence I am out of the habit of a daily journal.
I hope the process is instructive and gets my creative thoughts flowing again, as well as being a little cathartic. My very own Pensieve:
One simply siphons the excess thoughts from one's mind, pours them into the basin, and examines them at one's leisure. It becomes easier to spot patterns and links, you understand, when they are in this form.
Dr Winter writes on leadership, governance, and the conditions that determine whether either is practised well. His work draws on classical sources, organisational scholarship, and two decades inside the institutions he writes about.
The fraud doesn't end at appointment—it must be maintained. The people best placed to name it are the people whose interests depend on not naming it. Part two of two on who keeps the corporate con moving, and the one question that stops it.
Boards keep hiring the executive who says yes. An entire market—search, remuneration, coaching, consulting—now manufactures the corporate saviour and has no mechanism for telling the truth about what he can deliver. Part one of two on the fraud that begins at appointment.
The disruption industry treats breaking things as proof of seriousness. Edmund Burke—reformer, not reactionary—offered a corrective two centuries ago: most transformation programmes destroy more than they build. The best leaders renovate, not demolish.
Every organisation has one. Twelve boxes, each promising to reduce leadership to something measurable and trainable. The framework is everywhere—and it is wrong in a more fundamental sense than you might think.
