I grew up and was educated in Rome, Italy. The European didactic style tends to be more theoretical and less interactive than that of…

For the past 15 years or so, I have told audiences a story about how my perception of what determines good business performance has…

Leaders like to think that good planning and solid management are the keys to successful change. Yet too often their best efforts, combining their…

Consider all the learning that occurs as people move from place to place inside and outside an organization, carrying insights and ideas from one…

Leadership traditionally has been thought of as “doing the right thing” while management has been defined as “doing things right.” Contemporary leadership combines these…

The topics elementary- and middle-school students today study are complex and often difficult to understand. Seldom is an issue as simple as it appears…

This is a story about what happened to a group of technical managers working in a multinational corporation, the Big Can Corporation (BCC)*, when…

World events over the past several years have highlighted the need for new ways of exercising leadership. Such events include the ongoing crisis in…

The first part of this article, which appeared in the previous issue of The Systems Thinker (May 2010, Vol. 21 N. 4), introduced the “people-in-context”…

As members of communities and organizations, many people feel their days (and their energy!) being consumed by contentious conflicts between diverse stakeholder groups. Organizations…