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One of the more reassuring things about working with organizations is that most of the people involved are intelligent. This sounds obvious, but it is worth stating because it creates a useful starting

One of the more interesting things about organizational life is how much faith we place in meetings. When a problem appears, we schedule a meeting. When a decision needs to be made, we

One of the reasons I enjoy working in the arts sector is that it contains an unusually high concentration of thoughtful people. That may sound like a small thing, but it isn’t. Most

One of the more persistent assumptions in organizational life is that agreement is always the goal. Spend enough time around boards, committees, leadership teams, and planning processes and you begin to recognize how

One of the reasons I have become increasingly interested in organizations rather than marketing is that marketing often turns out not to be the real subject under discussion. The presenting issue is usually

One of the more curious things about organizational life is the amount of time spent discussing structures that audiences will never see. Organizations devote considerable energy to questions of governance, reporting relationships, departmental

There are certain sentences that appear so frequently in organizational life that people stop hearing them. They pass through meetings unnoticed. They appear in planning discussions, committee conversations, and board reports without attracting

I’ve been noticing a particular pattern for years, although I don’t think I fully appreciated how common it was until I started seeing it repeated across organizations that otherwise had very little in