Category: Blogs
Glass cliffs and ceilings: Statistics, gender balance, market failure, and loss of top talent
Sometimes, though I hate driving, my mind turns to randomly interesting areas. Today, it was gender balance – and I was reflecting on how much of the development work that I’ve done with senior teams puts me in a room full of men. When my classes are full of 50 something senior leaders, it will […]
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Change Strategy: Introduction (Science of Org Change)
A day late and a dollar short As a consultant frequently called-in mid-project when change is going badly, I am asked to supply tactical means of resolving people and culture problems. As with aid workers surveying a post-hurricane scene, I find political conflicts, unhappy stakeholders, culture clashes, dysfunctional project teams, skills issues, sponsorship troubles, delays […]
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Leadership and the body: The undiscovered frontier
The following is excerpted from the full article which is available to community members for free download using the link at the bottom of this page. Further articles from the Leadership White Paper series are coming soon. The next step for leadership? In bygone times, developing leaders focused on bettering their thinking: solving strategic problems […]
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Leadership in the Jungle
“These high-ROI innovations mean the program pays for itself many times over. The elegance of its design means that strong financial returns, talent development and the creation of social value coexist. The mutual reinforcement and harmony between these goals is precisely the bank’s ambition — for frequently these are seen as tradeoffs: do-good or make […]
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Healthcare Madness: An American Disease
Paul Gibbons Op Ed in the Capital Times Newspaper, April 2007 An uncertain hold on reality – that is what you Wisconsinites have. At least if you are one of the twenty people who have held me hostage and grilled me on healthcare since my return here. Not, “how were your 25 years in Europe, […]
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Leadership, linguistic ontology, somatics, and spirituality
Much leadership theory comes from psychology, or worse it is just made up. That is far too narrow a range of “sources” for a topic as important as leadership. In other publications, I talk about economics, neuroscience, sociology, and leadership. In this talk, given at the International Leadership Association in 2007, I introduce three other […]
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Cogntive Biases in the Boardroom: Implications for leadership and strategy
Slideshow: How do cognitive biases affect senior leadership decisions, and what can business strategists and board members do to circumvent the effect of non-rational decision making behavior. Cognitive biases and leadership decision making from Paul Gibbons
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VUCA and leadership: What tools do leaders need?
VUCA and Leadership The dynamic and fast-changing nature of our world today can be described by VUCA, a term coined by the US Army War College. VUCA stands for Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity…. There are two important megatrends: digitization, and the rise of the developing world. Digitization The first telegraph machine was invented in 1838. Forty years […]
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The Skeptics Guide to Neuroscience: Three things you should know
Neuroscience or neurobabble Does knowing the chemical formula for the reaction between octane and oxygen that takes place in the internal combustion engine help you repair a car? Will it help you win a Grand Prix? Perhaps not. Systems can be analyzed a number of levels from the quantum to the cosmic. For information to be useful […]
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Risks and Misuse of Big Data – Learning from Bank Fraud
In 1995, I was tapped on the shoulder at Coopers (now PwC) by a partner in the forensic accounting practice who was leading our investigation into a 93 million pound fraud ($140m) at NatWest bank. “Gibbons, you traded options, did you not?” “Some”, I replied. Then, suspiciously, “It says here you speak French?” Once he […]
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