Japan lost their edge and lost their place May 24, 2025
Japan was the second biggest economy in the world in 1990. What happened? Includes a translated post by Dr Vu.
A client CEO interviewed on YouTube May 20, 2025
Our client Ms Nguyễn Minh Hương, CEO of Golden Communications Group, appeared on the “Mindful Leadership” podcast, revealing her philosophy that has made her so successful in adopting Open Leadership and leading her organisation to Open Management, with all the great results they gained from that. (The English auto-translated captions are pretty good)
Individual accountability May 18, 2025
Let’s examine the concept of individual responsibility and individual accountability. They are essential for a centralised command-and-control hierarchy. While it is necessary for coercive management to be able to pin failure to meet outcomes on an individual, it is counterproductive to better ways of working. It is remarkable how entrenched the concept is – it proves hard …
Slow Work May 14, 2025
A decade ago, Rob wrote about “Slow IT” and “Slow Business”. It is as relevant today as then. The world is getting faster and faster: life, work, information, progress… they are all accelerating. There are counter-movements to try to restore some serenity. Slow Work is our provocative name. It doesn’t mean staff on a go-slow. It means …
The Quiet Collapse of the Middle May 12, 2025
On LinkedIn, Xiao Zhang shared an interesting post about “The Quiet Collapse of the Middle” , where she posed three questions for middle managers to help rescue themselves Could You Put Yourself First? Could We Share Some of the Weight? Could You Steady Your Beacon? Wonderful questions. She made me think about summarising our Open Management tactics for relieving this …
Skills training for executives highlighting psychological safety May 11, 2025
“Skills training for executives highlighting psychological safety and perspective-taking have been shown to improve business outcomes. …most organizations struggle to convert a theoretical understanding of PS into bottom-line results. We’ve found that this gap can be closed through skills training in the context of real work… Skandinaviska Enskilda Banken … were able to achieve revenues 25% …
All good relationships are built on trust. May 9, 2025
atest post from Dr. Cherry Vu over on FB in Vietnamese. A colleague of ours, who is also a consultant, shared: Talking with a friend the other night, we discussed the challenges we face in organizations. I suggested that most of these challenges, if you dig deep enough, stem from treating people as if they are …
Proud of what we do May 7, 2025
In our monthly newsletter I said I wouldn’t go into the politics of Teal Unicorn working in China. Afterwards, I thought WTH, when have I ever backed off a political opinion? So here we go. A follower suggested I’d “lost the plot”, travelling and working in China, given their human rights record. I’m neither an economist nor …
Eat the rich May 6, 2025
Here’s that graph again that shows up from time to time, revealing how capitalist owners have been siphoning off increasing productivity for their own enrichment at the cost of employees. What is unusual this time is that it comes from that bastion of capitalism, McKinsey, who said the amount of US national income captured by business profits …