I recently attended a meeting to discuss some emerging ideas on leadership and performance in the public sector. At one point, the topic of “best practice transfer” arose. This was unsurprising, given that this features in most of the high-profile enquiry reports that have been produced over recent years in…

This post was first published in Informal Coalitions in October 2008, under the title: "Discipline in organizations - On 'hot stove rules', performance conversations, and an opportunity to learn" The October 2008 edition of Management Today bemoaned the fact that the management of discipline and poor performance in the workplace…

In Informal Coalitions, I mentioned the oft-quoted statistic that upwards of two-thirds of planned change programmes end in failure. In this case, I used Breaking the Code of Change, edited in 2000 by HBS professors Michael Beer and Nitin Nohria, as the source of the claim. No doubt we could…

As Peter Drucker (1) once said, To make strength productive is the unique purpose of organization. It cannot, of course, overcome the weaknesses with which each one of us is abundantly endowed. But it can make them irrelevant. Its task is to use the strength of each man as a…

Conventionally, "performance management" systems focus on the so-called ‘people management’ bits of the overall process, with a heavy emphasis on numerical target setting, formal assessment of performance against targets, and the comparative rating and ranking of individuals for payment and/or other purposes.  However, the underlying dynamics of performance mean that…

I was reminded recently of a meeting I attended some 25 years ago, in the run-up to the privatisation of the UK Electricity Supply Industry. It was a regular get-together of a working group that had been set up to look at the new organizational practices required to operate effectively…

Chris Rodgers has been re-appointed as Honorary Senior Visiting Fellow in the Faculty of Management at Cass Business School, City University, London. This is Chris's third term as a visiting member of the Management Faculty, with the current period running from 1 December 2014 to 30 November 2017. Sir John Cass Business School,…