All posts by Rob England

“Efficiency is a second-order priority for government… capitalism has taught us that fast and cheap are inherently superior traits. That makes sense in the private sector, who aim to capture private value in the form of profit. Wasted time is wasted money that could be in the pockets of shareholders. In the public sector, who aim to create long-term public value, the same is not always true. More time spent engaging with stakeholders, reducing risk or considering options might be a net gain.”
– Alicia McKay

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Shareholder primacy is the dumbest business idea ever.

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A high-culture organisation unites staff around a cause they can believe in, preferably a noble one. That’s easy if you are Blue Dragon Children’s Foundation or Com Co Thit, or the World Health Org. But how do you do it for a bank or a mechanic?
Or a junk food restaurant? Waffle House do.

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Adaptability is at the heart of Open Work (along with Humanity and Systems Thinking).

From our upcoming book, The Open Executive:

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“We can be better” is a new tagline of mine, for the Teal Unicorn mission of making work better, that sets it in a more social context – that third part of our slogan “better work, better lives, better society“.

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There is something about the word accountabiity that smacks (pun intended) of judgement and punishment, even if unintended. Some – many – will take it that way.
And yet, no person is ever in control of reality:

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Amidst positive signs of a Second Enlightenment, there’s also a massive anti-woke backlash right now, in case you hadn’t noticed.

At Teal Unicorn we are committed to creating “Better results, better lives, better society” in the workplace. Our strategy has now pivoted to lighting up as many individual organisations as possible, to keep the flame alive in the face of the prevailing storm.  But how?

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We can never know the effect of an intervention until we do it.

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OK pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, start all over again. Two steps forward, one back. It’s time to get ready for the next two steps forward. [For future readers, this is posted on the day that Trump won the US election, again.]

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From our book we are working on for apex executives, 𝘛𝘩𝘦 𝘖𝘱𝘦𝘯 𝘌𝘹𝘦𝘤𝘶𝘵𝘪𝘷𝘦:

Complexity is a fundamental concept to get your head around to lead in the 21st Century. It hasn’t entered the mainstream thinking in business or society yet, though it is growing. Understanding of complexity is sorely needed to remove some constraints such as the public intolerance of failure which hobbles government and business alike; and to acknowledge other constraints like the impossibility of predicting the future.

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