Turn in any direction these days, and you’ll trip over people talking about their purpose. This is not a bad thing; it’s essential to individual and group endeavours. Yet, when I look past the virtue signals of purpose-led this and purposeful that, I struggle to see how people put it…

It’s 1990, and a Stanford University graduate student in psychology named Elizabeth Newton is using a game to test how people communicate. She’s assigned students roles of ‘tappers’ and ‘listeners’ and asked the tappers to pick a well-known song and tap the song on a table. …

Values aren’t on or off. It’s more of a slippery slope kind of thing. And while people expend untold efforts labelling what a value is, scant attention gets paid to what it isn’t and even less to when it goes too far. My recent articles have explored values, culture…

“And then we started the brand work”, said the CEO while I listened to her talk about the behind-the-scenes effort to reimagine their product. Then, later the same week, I received another company’s business plan. …

Sticking with values, I want to expand on an element of Aristotle’s golden mean from my last article. I call it productive tension. Look under the covers of successful organisations, and you will find tension at work. No, I’m not talking about “this place sucks” hostility. You can most commonly…

Too many conversations about values start by asking are they right or wrong. But for most organisations “How do we use them?” is a more worthy and useful question. I’ll go further. It’s the only question that truly matters. And I’m not talking about laundry lists of behaviours for doing…

On the bottom shelf of my bookcase, I’ve got a small library of books and a stack of papers that explore promises and commitments. The authors ramble at length about the moral foundations and legal consequences of making, keeping and breaking promises. …

“Walk your talk” is attributed as a simpler way of saying, “if you’re going to talk the talk, you’ve got to walk the walk”. In this case, simpler isn’t better, and when I saw a recent tweet using the shorter saying, my immediate response was, “that’s backwards”. Dangerously backwards. Feeding…

When an organisation puts a ‘fun place to work’ in their values, they often mean a games room, funky furniture and kombucha on tap. Not how they carry out the unheroic work living beneath the trappings. The Play Ethic author Pat Kane says play “Helps release thoughts that are locked…