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Compliance and Integrity

The company I work for is making headlines in the national newspapers over the past couple of months and not all for the right reasons. A settlement to avoid legal procedures in a case about bribing Middle East government officials, signing…
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Elevator etiquette

Lately I have worked on a project where most of the work is done more than 30 floors above ground level. For the Netherlands that is quite exceptional. This country is flat and many cities seem to be reluctant in allowing high rise buildings.…
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Business talk or pidgin English?

The Netherlands are an open economy in which trade is an important factor. This goes back for centuries. You could argue that back in the 17th century the Dutch East India Company was the first multinational corporation. And for a fact it was…
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Consumerisation vs. Corporate IT: 1-0

Recently the company I work for introduced Tibbr as an internal Social Network. It is a nice product suite with functionality you would expect in such a platform. We can now chat, blog, set up communities, and exchange ideas online via Tibbr.…
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Get personal: attention improves performance

In the early days of industrial revolution scientists conducted many tests to better understand what impacts productivity. A well known experiment was to differentiate the level of illumination in otherwise comparable factory halls. Before and…
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Better is the enemy of good enough…

The Management Consultant as any professional strives for the best result. Whether she/he drafts a proposal, makes a presentation or creates a final report, there is continuously room for further improvement and putting in more effort is always…
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Collaborative writing: a skill or an art form?

Sometimes it seems that all communication today is in sound-bites, 140 character tweets or blog posts. Anything beyond 500 words seems to be in the exclusive domain of poets, novelists and other professional writers. Not so for the Management…
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Conference call etiquette

Every trade or industry has its tools. And apart from the IT stuff like spreadsheets, word-processors and a variety of presentation apps, today's Management Consultant cannot work without conference calls. Communication is among our primary…
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The “Baby on board!” sign illustrates that not all information is useful…

In today's traffic you can regularly see cars with a sign stating "Baby on board!". It puzzles me greatly what moves parents to share this type of information with their fellow drivers. I do not intend to discuss whether this information is…
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Are governments the driving force behind innovation?

A friend of mine from India recently forwarded me the story of the successful launching of Mangalyaan. This initiative is part of the Mars Orbiter Mission of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). The ISRO is the Indian equivalent of…
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Challenger: lessons learned from a disaster

Recently a TV Movie 'The Challenger Disaster' was released about the investigation into the explosion in 1986 of the space shuttle Challenger. The story focuses on the contribution Richard Feynman made to the Rogers Commission that investigated…
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Time = money?

When someone walks up to you and asks for money what would you do? I'm not talking small change for a street musician. Think about a colleague showing up at your desk asking for an amount of money in the order of your commercial hourly rate.…