All posts by Rob England

Blog posts for January 2025

More AI-generated radio shows, a deep dive into Better 2025, and into AI

If you have forty minutes, here are 3 “radio shows” generated completely by AI (Google’s NotebookLM), including the voices.  It’s astonishingly good. The voices are uncannily realistic, way better than any other voicing tool I have tried yet.

Candy on the Doorstep

At Teal Unicorn, we create content about better ways of managing and working.
It is wildly effective, proven by us at over 20 clients now, from 10 to 10,000 staff in a range of industries; and proven by hundreds of other progressive organisations around the world.
We share it for free. No strings attached, no selling. The hard part is getting people to look.It’s like leaving candy on the doorstep. Nobody believes or trusts it.

Cultural malaise in 2025

In the Better 2025 project, we talk about the prevailing cultural headwinds that make progressive ideas so hard to spread right now.  All this in the context of a cultural meltdown

Islands of light

Here is the point of our “island of light metaphor” for Better 2025.

Three legged stool

Open ways of working is a three-legged stool: Human Systems Adaptability.  You can’t have one without the others.

Overwhelm

A word came up twice in my inbox, two emails right next to each other talked about “overwhelm”, from two of my favourite sources of ideas: Corporate Rebels, and The Guardian. I realised I’ve been seeing that word around. That’s the zeitgeist right now: overwhelmed.

More AI-generated radio shows, a deep dive into Better 2025, and into AI

If you have forty minutes, here are 3 “radio shows” generated completely by AI (Google’s NotebookLM), including the voices.  It’s astonishingly good. The voices are uncannily realistic, way better than any other voicing tool I have tried yet. If you’re in a hurry, skip to the last one. 

The AI generating the audio gets just enough facts wrong so as to be completely realistic, just like a human journalist. All these are unedited. I’ve taken bad errors out of other NotebookLM Audio Overviews in the past, but I left these ones, they’re good enough. Despite that, the depth of the reflection by the AI is astonishing. 

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a bowl of colourful sweets sitting on a doorstep

Candy on the Doorstep

At Teal Unicorn, we create content about better ways of managing and working.
It is wildly effective, proven by us at over 20 clients now, from 10 to 10,000 staff in a range of industries; and proven by hundreds of other progressive organisations around the world.
We share it for free. No strings attached, no selling. The hard part is getting people to look.
It’s like leaving candy on the doorstep. Nobody believes or trusts it.
Maybe we need to be secretive and charge a fortune for it.

Read More

Overwhelm

A word came up twice in my inbox, two emails right next to each other talked about “overwhelm”, from two of my favourite sources of ideas: Corporate Rebels, and The Guardian. I realised I’ve been seeing that word around. That’s the zeitgeist right now: overwhelmed.

We are all having a rough decade. From the global to the personal, the rate of change and the uncertainty are hard to stay on top of. Interesting times. The term VUCA has fallen out of fashion but it still works great for me. It nails the state, the situation we are all in.

The question is how to cope, how to not be overwhelmed. I think the only way is a letting go, an acceptance of VUCA state as normal, instead of trying to force more stability and predictability than is possible. By embracing the new reality of 2025, we are led to find different ways of dealing with it.
We won’t go into those ways in one post. They’re all over what we write and do at Teal Unicorn.
To escape being overwhelmed, accept that what got you here won’t get you there. Work out what has to go, and what can take its place. Get out from under the weight of overwhelm.

portable espresso maker

(You can make espresso coffee anywhere, for thirty bucks. What a time to be alive.)

Blog posts for December 2024

Think local, act local, live local

Our Better 2025 strategy could be summed up as “Think local, act local”. Similarly, we will continue to travel this year, but we are also grateful to live somewhere so beautiful that WFH is a joy.

Better 2025

None of us can do much about the global movements taking society, culture, and work backwards right now. This is the homepage for the Better 2025 project.

WHEN THE LEADER LEADS: Golden Communication Group

Amidst challenging economic conditions where many businesses are struggling to stay afloat, there are still companies transforming and achieving remarkable breakthroughs. Golden Communication Group is one of the businesses Teal Unicorn has “rescued” recently. After struggling for several years, in late 2023 they invited us, Rob England and I at Teal Unicorn to come & help transforming their organisation. By the end of 2024, Golden had achieved impressive results

Nineteen years of Two Hills

Celebrating the 19th birthday of Two Hills Ltd, founded 14th December 2005. With a retrospective of 19 years of achievements.

The perfect Open Executive

Sketching the main descriptors of the idealised hypothetical perfect “Open executive”, as per Teal Unicorn’s Open philosophy of work; compared to the equally hypothetical worst-possible “conventional executive”.

Open Performance Management

How does Performance Management look different in Open Management? Because who doesn’t love a flowchart.

IDG Inner Development Goals Framework

The Inner Development Goals Framework exactly matches what we say in our new book, The Open Executive. We considered rewriting to use the structure when we discovered it, but we were already on the 7th rewrite, so we settled for enjoying the confirmation.

Marketing funnel

In our tradition of transparency, here is our marketing funnel design for 2025. Comments welcomed.

Progress

Let’s see if we can resurrect a word that has fallen out of favour: “progress”. Humanity has made fabulous progress in the last two centuries, thanks to science and technology. People live longer and healthier, travel widely, learn anything they want, hear about the planet. There has never been a better time to be alive. But there will be better ones ahead. That’s progress.

capitalism isn’t the problem

One sees a lot of talk about how capitalism cares only for the shareholders, willing to abuse and kill people to maximise profits. It’s simply not true. Capitalism is an emergent property of society, like money or art. You can’t remove it. Somebody always profits from the means of production, as all the failed attempts at Communism have shown.

Confirming the shrinking Foreseeable

In our book S&T Happens we talked about the shrinking distance ahead that organisations can see – how planning increasingly becomes waste. A recent CIO.com  article supports that, talking about the impact on IT roadmaps.

Think local, act local, live local

Our Better 2025 strategy could be summed up as “Think local, act local”. None of us can do much about the global movements taking society, culture, and work backwards right now, so my response is to pivot to a narrow focus on what I can influence and control, one organisation and leader at a time.  Similarly, we will continue to travel this year, but we are also grateful to live somewhere so beautiful that WFH is a joy. 

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WHEN THE LEADER LEADS: Golden Communication Group

Amidst challenging economic conditions where many businesses are struggling to stay afloat, there are still companies transforming and achieving remarkable breakthroughs. Golden Communication Group is one of the businesses Teal Unicorn has “rescued” recently. After struggling for several years, in late 2023 they invited us, Rob England and I at Teal Unicorn to come & help transforming their organisation. By the end of 2024, Golden had achieved impressive results:

Read More