How can you break out of the group-think that affects most large organizations? How can you escape from the corporate frameworks that shape discussions and ideas? Philips is moving from a high-volume electronics manufacturere to a design-led, lifestyle technology company. It needs help to get there so it set up a 'simplicity board'. Philips reckoned it needed a fresh perspective from creative types with no ties to the company. So it formed the simplicity board, a group of external specialists in health care, fashion, design, and architecture. "Philips was too inward-looking," says Andrea Ragnetti, Chief Marketing Offier. "To really embed simplicity into the company's DNA, we needed an element of vision."

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In this article, Martin Evans considers the barriers to accurate information gathering in large organizations. “I expect to get valid information … I can’t make good decisions unless I get valid information” George W. Bush, April 13th 2004. George Bush’s cry is echoed by every organizational manager in the world. Looking back on the Presidency of George W. Bush we can see many information failures. Every manager would like to be sure that the information received was both timely and accurate. Every good manager knows it’s their responsibility to make sure that information received is timely and accurate. Despite his Yale education, George W. Bush did not learn this. Every good manager knows about the three major barriers to the realization of good information: group think, self-serving subordinates, and uncertainty absorption. Despite his Harvard Business School Education, George W. Bush failed to grasp this. Good managers are proactive to ensure that these barriers are overcome. Despite his years of management experience, George W. Bush did not learn this. In this article I will deal with the three barriers:

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In the United States, innovation has become almost synonymous with economic competitiveness. Even more remarkable, we often hear that our economic salvation can only be through innovation. We hear that because of low Asian wages we must innovate because we cannot really compete in anything else. Inventive Americans will do the R&D and let the rest of the world, usually China, do the dull work of actually making things. Or we'll do programming design but let the rest of the world, usually India, do low-level programming. This is a totally mistaken belief and one that, if accepted, will consign this nation to second- or third-class status. The latest offender to advance this line of thought is Thomas Friedman, who has prominently displayed this familiar and entirely incorrect line of thought in the New York Times. Unfortunately, this idea is one that is widely accepted without careful thought about either its truthfulness or its consequences.

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Marshall McLuhan famously said: "We shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us." The same, I believe, holds for community. We shape our community by choosing which actors comprise it and what roles they play. And we want to be a valued member of that community, so we adhere to its norms and conventions — our happiness depends on it. For this reason, the community we choose is critically important. If it is a productive community, it will help make us better. If it is unproductive, it will quietly but surely make us worse. So it behooves us to explore the quality of the community of the modern business executive. As mentioned in my last post, customers, employees, home city and long-term shareholders loomed large in the typical community of the 1950s and 1960s. The intimacy of these communities was aided by the more manageable scale of the enterprises of the day. GM, the behemoth of 1960, pulled in revenues that would in today's dollars ($66 billion) put it behind Archer Daniels Midland, 2009's 27th placed company, way below number one Exxon Mobil with $442 billion. In fact, only ten companies in 1960 were bigger than regional power utility Pacific Gas and Electric (#176) in 2009.

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I don' think I have ever seen a better visualization of leadership. This is genuinely worth offering as an introduction to any leadership workshop you might want to run.It is funny, memorable, down right inspiring and humbling.