by Jonathan Gifford | Jan 31, 2014 | Business & Leadership
In my previous blogs, I have given some background to the story of Ricardo Semler, who took over the Brazilian manufacturing company, Semco, from his father and nearly ruined his health by behaving as the kind of hard-driving autocratic business owner that he assumed...
by Jonathan Gifford | Jan 31, 2014 | Business & Leadership
In my earlier blog, Ricardo Semler, Maverick: organisational democracy or anarchy? or I said that I didn’t believe that ‘democracy’ is a good model for running a modern business – despite the apparent success of Ricardo Semler, author of Maverick and The Seven...
by Jonathan Gifford | Jan 30, 2014 | Business & Leadership
If you are interested, as I am, in how we can drag the organisation out of the old, nineteenth-century, early-industrial structure in which it currently languishes, and create a new kind of organisation that is fit for purpose in the twenty-first century, then...
by Jonathan Gifford | Nov 21, 2013 | Leadership Ideas
Management seeks to regularise the irregular; to iron-out discrepancies and to correct deviations in the search for the perfectly-managed process. But this search for efficiency and predictability can never (by definition) generate happy accidents or surprises....
by Jonathan Gifford | Nov 15, 2013 | Leadership Ideas
Your organisation probably has a lot more data to hand than it realises – and almost certainly a lot more data than it actually uses. That data can just sit there collecting dust (or whatever the electronic equivalent is of dust on digital data) – or you can mine it...