March 7, 2021 Mapwiya Muulupale 20 Comments
“Every leader needs a fool,” he says. Someone to tell them the truth? Who? The chairman, their best friend? “Your wife, your husband. And the fool should, regularly, tell you you are full of shit!” Consultants? “No. Never hire a hungry consultant. Never.” Because they will tell you what you want to hear?
“Exactly.” – an extract from a conversation between Manfred Kets de Vries and the author, Skapinker, M., 2021. The CEO whisperer: ‘Every leader needs a fool’,-
Financial Times.
Let me tell you a story. On second thought, I will tell you two.
Chizuma according to Chakwera is ‘one of the shining lights of integrity on top of a hill in whose valleys remain the dark shadows of institutional corruption and impunity across the public sector’
What It Means to Embark on a Journey of Change insead.edu - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from insead.edu Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Do they see their organization as
a well-oiled machine with clear structures and roles, command and control, certainty, agreements etc.? This requires linear thinking.
Or do they see their organization as
a complex adaptive eco-system with distributed networks of teams with informal influencers, dealing with surprises, uncertainties disagreements, paradoxes, stimulating creativity etc.? This requires complexity thinking. Their view influences HOW they structure and lead their organization.
The pressure to change has been building for years, even before the COVID-19 pandemic. Boards and senior executives worried their organizations were too slow, too siloed and too bureaucratic. What many leaders feared, and what the pandemic confirms, is that their companies were organized for a world that is disappearing, an era of standardization and predictability is overtaken by four big trends, a combination of:
niks (which is a noun) to
niksen (which is a verb). So niksen literally means nothing-ing. Marjan Simons offers an alternative explanation:
niksen comes from
niksen.
As I researched niksen, I learned of other Dutch words with similar meanings, such as
lanterfanten. On her website BoekCoach (Book Coach), Dutch writer, editor, and entrepreneur Elise de Bres explains that
lanterfanten is like niksen in that “you can just do as you please and there is no aim in whatever you do.”
Another synonym is
luieren. (You just try to pronounce all those vowels! I’ve been here for ten years and still can’t manage.) In fact, the title of the Dutch edition of this book is