Sometimes a friend makes such a profound and lasting impression on one’s life that it inspires a need to share that person’s legacy with the world. So it is with my dear friend, Peter Koestenbaum, Ph.D. Peter and I met a decade ago in the spring of 2013 when I…

The Importance of Effective Decision Making in Organizations — Everyone makes a bad decision from time to time — that’s only human. While some bad decisions are obviously more impactful than others, we’re learning more and more about the influence of emotion and bias in decision making. We’re not necessarily creatures of pure logic when it comes to deciding…

Doug Kirkpatrick “How wonderful that we have met with a paradox. Now we have some hope of making progress.” — Niels Bohr, Nobel Prize-Winning Physicist and one of the founders of quantum theory. We live in a world that is becoming increasingly complex and is becoming so at an accelerating…

April 24, 2013 was a beautiful, clear day here in Northern California. I was driving to an early morning meeting (about organization design, naturally) on Highway 99 near Stockton. …

In recent years, we have witnessed a seismic shift in how management is conducted. Organizations and individuals alike are questioning the validity of hierarchical management structures, and for many, a new era of self-management is underway. The way we manage organizations seems increasingly out of date, as survey after survey…

Happy 180th Birthday, Train Wreck Management! Yesterday, October 5, 1841 marked the birth of business bureaucracy when two passenger trains collided on the Western Railway, killing 2 and injuring 17. The railroad appointed Major George W. …

This article originally appeared in Emergence, The Journal of Business Agility, Issue №3, June, 2021. Peter Koestenbaum’s parents fled Nazi Germany just before World War II, landing in Venezuela, where Peter grew up. A brilliant student, he studied philosophy at Stanford, Harvard and Boston University and began a stellar academic…

The Enron scandal and bankruptcy of the early 2000s was a financial debacle for thousands, sent former CEOs to prison, and led to the extinction of a Big Five accounting firm. It also transformed corporate governance, ushering in the era of Sarbanes-Oxley transparency and accountability. …

The true weight of bureaucracy’s heavy hand is being felt more keenly in organizations worldwide since the COVID-19 crisis and the rapid dispersal of millions of workers to remote locations. Annoying bureaucratic processes, ham-handed spyware deployments and erratic Brownian-motion Zoom meetings are compromising worker engagement in myriad ways. …