Dr Mark Powell, one of the co-authors of this article, is an unusual beast: a dancing management consultant. Mark has worked at partner level at several consultancies, including Accenture, KPMG and A.T. Kearney. He is also a world championship-winning Latin ballroom dancer, winning the WDC Open World Over-35 Latin Championship for two years running while…
In our previous article, Developing A Performance Culture, we explored what business can learn from the performing arts. We asked you to think about a time when you perhaps sang in a choir or played in a band or orchestra; performed in a play or musical or did a stand-up routine. When we perform like…
In 2011, a major oil and gas exploration company based in the UK set out on an extraordinary, arts-based leadership development programme at Oxford University’s Saïd Business School, designed and led by Dr Mark Powell. The oil and gas company’s senior project managers are responsible for multi-million-dollar exploration projects around the world and the programme was…
In an earlier post, How Business Can Learn from the Performing Arts, we gave a brief account of a major arts-based leadership development programme at Oxford University’s Saïd School of Business, designed to create new behaviors in a group of senior project managers in the oil and gas exploration industry. The aim was to create…
This is the third in a series of five articles describing a major arts-based leadership development programme at Oxford University’s Saïd Business School, designed and run over a four-year period by Dr Mark Powell. Read the previous article: Teaching Leaders To Dance In the programme, which was conducted on behalf of a major oil and gas…
This post is the fourth in a series of five articles describing a major arts-based leadership development programme at Oxford University’s Saïd Business School, designed and run over a four-year period by Dr Mark Powell. Read the previous article: ‘Turning Businesses Into Ensembles’ The aim of the programme was to create a new culture of…
This is the last in a series of five articles describing a major arts-based leadership development programme at Oxford University’s Saïd Business School, designed and run over a four-year period by Dr Mark Powell, one of the authors of this article. Previous posts have looked at the way in which delegates to the programme worked…
The difference between learning a new leadership theory and being a better leader The brain processes explicit knowledge – ‘knowing how’ – differently from the way it processes implicit knowledge – ‘knowing that’. This has significant implications for executive coaching, argue Dr Mark Powell and Jonathan Gifford A recent article in MIT News reports that…
In the early 1900s, the US was swept up with a drive for improved ‘efficiency’ in every field of endeavour; a drive that was significant enough to earn its own title: the Efficiency Movement. This movement is seen by historians as a part of the wider Progressive Era – the early twentieth-century drive to clean…
Read more Scientific Management: The Pernicious Persistence of Taylorism
In another post, ‘Creating an Organisational Culture for the Age of Ideas’, we argued that the culture of many organisations is still unthinkingly based on the old industrial-era mindset of scientific management and command and control. We suggested that there are a number of persistent organisational behaviors that have their origins in this outmoded culture…
Read more 10 Organisational Behaviours Stuck In The Industrial Era
Many modern organisations are unthinkingly locked into an organisational culture that began with the Industrial Revolution in eighteenth-century Britain and was fully developed during the Second Industrial Revolution in the US. The great success of these revolutions – creating modern business and generating huge wealth – makes it easy to believe that what worked as…
Read more Creating Organisational Cultures For The Age of Ideas
Hero leadership is a big ask: we need leadership in depth If organisations didn’t have to cope with change, we wouldn’t need leadership – we could simply manage the existing, well-established processes, doing the same thing over and over again in a nice, comfortable way. But things do change, and organisations must change constantly to…
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