Don’t Eat Your Seed Corn: Tenant Farmers Don’t Pick Up Rocks

“Tenant farmers don’t pick up rocks.”Ā Just as tenant farmers, who have short-term leases on the land they cultivate, lack the incentive to invest in long-term improvements like clearing the fields of rocks, some leaders with increasingly short tenures hesitate to make crucial investments in the future of their organisations. Rather than focus on initiatives that require time and resources to bear fruit, they often shutter them, earn a bonus on their efforts, and are out the gate before the lack of seedcorn becomes apparent. Consequently, the organisation becomes stuck in a cycle of short-term gains, missing out on the long-term benefits that arise from seedcorn investments and productivity programmes akin to picking up rocks.

Image of Marty Cagan author of Empowered_

Marty Cagan – Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products

Marty Cagan.has long worked to reveal the best practices of the most consistently innovative companies in the world. A natural companion to his bestselling book INSPIRED, EMPOWERED tackles head-on the reason why most companies fail to leverage the potential of their people to innovate truly: product leadership.Ā 

Image of Bill Aulet Disciplined Entrepreneurship

Bill Aulet – Disciplined Entrepreneurship

Whether youā€™re a first-time or repeat entrepreneur, Disciplined Entrepreneurship gives you the tools you need to improve your odds of making a product people want.
Author Bill Aulet is the managing director of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship as well as a senior lecturer at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Dragon attacking a ship

Here Be Dragons: Embracing Uncertainty

To successfully navigate the new world, we must humbly accept; that we don’t know what we donā€™t know. Like the mapmakers of the past, we must accept that accepting ignorance had to come before embracing knowledge. In the business world, this means a departure from the world of a five-year plan (map) in favour of the uncertain harbour of a five-year direction, where an organisational North Star serves as a magnetic force. This new mental map leaves enough room for uncertainty, deviation and exploration, just like the Ribeiro map.

An image of one bad apple

Black Walnuts, Broken Windows, Bad Apples: Hire Slow and Fire Fast

If you neglect to remove the black walnut, you will see a gradual departure of the surrounding species to healthier pastures, with the younger saplings leading the way. In conclusion, just as removing a black walnut tree from an environment restores balance and promotes healthy growth, it’s essential to address toxic employees in the workplace to maintain a positive and productive work environment. It is essential to repair the broken windows.

The Microstress Effect with Karen Dillon

Karen Dillon – The Microstress Effect

Microstress: tiny moments of stress triggered by people in our personal and professional lives; stresses so routine that we barely register them but whose cumulative toll is debilitating. We welcome the author of “The Microstress Effect” Karen Dillon

An image of a chameleon

Chameleonic Cultures

When an organisation recalibrates to adopt a radically new strategy, most leaders focus on the changes in processes, practices and procedures. These are the mechanics of business, the easiest to measure and easier to implement. Successful change efforts engage both the mechanics and humanics of change. The humanics involves the community, collaboration and culture. In a world of constant change, organisations must adopt a “chameleonic” culture, one that is capable of rapid change in line with strategic change.

A old lady becoming younger

Organisational Senescence: Senescent SkillsetsĀ 

Some organisations engage in renewal as an event rather than an ongoing process. In such cases, they find their organisational skillsets and capabilities are inadequate for the new reality. Often employees who excelled in a previous reality struggle in the new paradigm. In some cases, these employees become senescent. They can even act like a senescent cell and influence those around them to become toxic and malevolent.

Andrew Binns

Andrew Binns – The Corporate Explorer

Our guest had just joined IBM from McKinsey and was assigned as an internal consultant charged with supporting these nascent businesses.
We are about to hear that story and so much more.
It is a pleasure to welcome the author of ā€œThe Corporate Explorer: How Corporations Beat Startups at the Innovation Gameā€ Andrew Binns

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