
Culturele (in)compabiliteit
Wanneer bedrijven besluiten om een deel van hun activiteiten door anderen te laten uitvoeren dan vergt dat de nodige voorbereiding. Men investeert tijd en energie in een sourcing strategie met overwegingen over wat wel of niet uitbesteed kan…


“So anyway…” overwegingen van John Cleese
Recent vond ik een Google Talk met John Cleese die werd geïnterviewed naar aanleiding van zijn memoirs "So, Anyway...". Om dit een interview te noemen is een compliment voor Jason Sanders die zijn best deed om de conversatie te sturen.…

Musical chairs in the corporate world
Career development systems in a consultancy firm have some nasty streaks in it. First I'll explain how it works and then why I think we should abolish it in this form asap.
The career development in many partnership firms is a variation on…

From cost to value
Outsourcing has been around for some time now. After the mega deals in the late nineties, the industry developed quite a bit. Deals became smaller, engagement are now mostly multi-vendor, in some cases with a prime vendor responsible for service…

Tomorrow’s Lawyers: An Introduction to Your Future
Richard Susskind is a British author, speaker, and independent adviser to international professional firms and national governments and he holds professorships at the University of Oxford, Gresham College and Strathclyde University. Wikipedia…

The Age of Sustainable Development
Last weekend I completed a course about Sustainable Development on Coursera. The past fourteen weeks professor Jeffrey D. Sachs from the Earth Institute and Columbia University shared his insights in a series of video lectures and suggested…

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…

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.…

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…

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.…

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…