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The Leadership Self
By Drew Jones In his book, Modernity and Self Identity, Anthony Giddens explores the various ways that individuals maintain a cohesive sense of self in a post-modern world. The collapse/disappearance of traditional cultural systems all around us creates uncertainty and anxiety, within which we have fewer and fewer reliable islands where we can call home.
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What Would You Say You Do Here?
By Drew Jones Over the past decade, Roger Martin has written prolifically about how the principles and methods of design thinking(DT) are transforming the way some companies are being managed. Key among the insights from DT is the simple yet challenging observation that in today’s high-performance firms, top talent is almost always engaged in tangible
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It Starts with Strategy
By Drew Jones In conversations with fellow organizational consultants, I often hear that their engagements with their clients are, primarily, supportive in nature. That is, they are there to help that company achieve its strategic goals, whatever those might be. Sounds straightforward enough, right? Well, perhaps not. First, many firms (the clients) can be rather
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I Can’t Prove It
Several years ago, at the Transform Innovation Summit at the Mayo Clinic, Roger Martin gave a moving talk about what kills and what drives innovation. In the talk, which he called a rant, he suggested that the two words- prove and it- when used together, are innovation killers. He provided several powerful examples in the talk, which I recommend that everyone
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So Much for Science and Rationality
On the opening day (11/7/13) of its IPO, Twitter shares (TWTR) traded up from its offer price of $26/share to $45/share. By contrast, Facebook (FB) opened (5/12/13) at $42/share and promptly began to train downward for many months. Facebook has since then been trading up for several months ($47 today), which is indeed good to
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The Lonely Frontier
It is cliche to say, but change is never easy. The kinds of organizational changes I am advocating in my new book- The Fifth Age of Work– are far from easy. The comfort of familiarity and tradition should never be underestimated. Established tradition and known routines make the world easier to understand and navigate. Yet, established
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What is Leadership Today?
Today my new book- The Fifth Age of Work– has finally arrived. In the book I outline the various points of convergence between the growing world of freelancers and small businesses, on the one hand, and a rapidly transforming corporate world, on the other. For firms interested in thriving in the Fifth Age, as opposed to
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Activity Based Work
Veldhoen + Company, the Dutch workplace consultancy that pioneered Activity Based Work, is one of the most important companies you’ve never heard of. ABW is, essentially, mass scale corporate coworking. Everyone in the company, including the CEO and other top managers, gets a laptop and a locker for storage. People choose workspaces that fit the
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Y Leadership
This fall my new book, The Fifth Age of Work, will be published by Night Owls Press. The book tracks the parallel evolution of the independent, freelancer economy, on the one hand, and the rapid transformation of mainstream firms, on the other. At the heart of the book is the idea that, in the relatively
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At the Crossroads
Standing at the Crossroads! There is something about Austin, Texas, and there is something about Conjunctured, though I’m still not sure what that something is. However, here we are, and both Austin and Conjunctured sit as crossroads for people in local, national, and global communities. Not a week goes by here at Conjunctured when someone