Blog
Manage your R&D Portfolio
Managing your innovation and R&D portfolio in a large organization is a complex challenge– it requires combining creative capabilities with a process of governance. It requires vision and realism… a culture of reasoned adventuring coupled with good old project...
Top 10 Strategy Execution Trends
With the New Year upon us, it’s time to reflect on the top trends in Strategy Execution Management from 2022. Strategy execution is not a new topic. It has been around for decades and is recognized as one of the most challenging aspects of strategy. However, we are...
Data and Information Filters
If we cannot avoid living in a world that drenches us with information – still, we can and must select for our processing the information that is likely to be useful to us and ignore the rest.- Herbert Simon Herbert Simon was one of those multidisciplinary luminaries...
PPM as a Central Nervous System
Organizations are like living organisms. Bill Gates makes this point in his book Business @ the Speed of Thought. Organisms and organizations both have a central nervous system. One is somatic, the other metaphorical. The body is a dynamic and living messaging system....
The New Diamonds
Constraints have increased and so has demand for sustainable value. In good times there was a wide margin of error. Sometimes even seat-of-the-pants decision-making works, but so does winning at the casino. Both are unreliable and usually unrepeatable. Gambling with...
Complexity Busting
The best-in-class project-selection process reduces complexity and accelerates good decision making. Complexity is a problem all of us have to deal with. And it’s a problem that’s not going away anytime soon. The scientific law of entropy show’s the universe’s...
Lost Keys
"Fanaticism consists of redoubling your effort when you have forgotten your aim." - George Santayana. In the absence of a holistic view of your entire portfolio of projects and lack of defined process, you rely on guesswork. Under pressure or through habit you revert...
A Thousand Cuts
Imperial China was reputed to have invented a horrible torture as a means of example and execution: death by a thousand cuts. The victim died a slow and painful death. Each cut in and of itself would not kill, but the accumulation of cuts led to unimaginable suffering...
A Mouthful of Fish
The Atlantic puffin is an agile creature, diving from the air or the water’s surface down into the depths of the sea to feed. Underwater, it is highly manoeuvrable and has a remarkable capacity to carry up to thirty small fish in its beak at one time. Question: When...
My Moment of Truth
The event that changed my career happened on December 14, 1996, at precisely 6.30 a.m. I was commuting. The radio was on. I wasn’t paying attention until these words hit me like a sock to the jaw: do not go to your grave with your music still inside you. Then the idea...