Culture beats strategy

I often see and hear the well-worn business axiom: Culture beats stratgegy, every time… So I wasn’t particularly surprised to hear the news that Mike Lynch and quite a few of the top Autonomy team would be leaving Hewlett Packard, less than a year after HP bought Autonomy in a multibillion dollar deal.

Reports of the [former] Autonomy board READ MORE

Interim affix has lost its integrity

The interim management market has changed significantly over the past decade, although I believe that much of the change is not helpful to professional interims and clients alike.

The proliferation of ‘interim’ roles has much more to do with the profligate use of the word interim as an affix to a vacancy, applied indiscriminately as a misconceived synonym substitute for READ MORE

non-contractual contractual obligations

Best endeavours might be a problem

In the world of contracted service delivery it is not uncommon to come across the terms ‘best endeavours’ and ‘reasonable endeavours.’ These phrases are either incorporated into the documentation, or expressed by service delivery managers, when a situation arises that is beyond their explicit contractual obligations.

No matter how well-intentioned the phrase may be, it has no protection from legal READ MORE

Time for the CIO as Chief Integration Officer?

It seems that more people are starting to take a serious interest in the future role of the CIO. This is something that has been very close to my own heart for the past five years or more.

My POV is that nobody needs a Chief Information Officer, the role has never been properly resolved and is therefore most often READ MORE

re-inventing the wheel should be mandatory

Management by cliché is dangerous, if not fatal. But it happens. I am not in favour and I think that it’s high time we ditched a particularly dangerous but well-worn business cliché and accept that routinely and regularly re-inventing the wheel is a healthy practice, not a waste of time.

After all, where would the world be if our READ MORE