9 December

I haven’t seen many organisations that don’t struggle to understand the best way to run and lead their work. Millions or even tens of millions of people worldwide are cynically mocking their companies‘ ‘visions’ and ‘missions’ and ‘strategic plans’. I’m convinced this is because we understand organisations in ‘big picture’ ways, we think the organisation is a separate, ‘big’ thing to the people working in it. Paul O’Neill was the CEO of Alcoa, a major multinational. He realised that you only need to focus on specific problems, no matter how small they seem. No generalities, no big pictures. The problems link everything to everything else, automatically. Alcoa’s profits increased five-fold.