Jan Höglund's Blog

Author: Jan Höglund

  • Management as stewardship of the living

    There was a Stoos Connect gathering in Amsterdam this week with some twenty speakers including Steve Denning, Dan Pink, and others. Videos of the talks will be made available on-line shortly. Going forward, Steve Denning suggests the following Five Guideposts For The Future Of Leadership and Management: We need to recognize the extent of the…

  • The living organization

    I have raised the view in a previous blog post that an organization is more like an organism than a machine. Now, I’m reading The Living Company: Growth Learning and Longevity in Business by Arie de Geus. The question at the heart of the book is: What if we think about a company as a…

  • Domination Structures

    I have recently read Speak Peace in a World of Conflict: What You Say Next Will Change Your World by Marshall Rosenberg. Marschall defines a domination system as a system in which a few people control many people to their own advantage. In domination systems people are trained to think in ways that support the…

  • Safe space

    Daniel Mezick emphasizes the importance of psychological safe space in his book The Culture Game: Tools for the Agile Manager. I find this very interesting and think that Daniel is right when he writes on that: “This psychological safety is one of (if not THE) most important aspects of developing a Learning Organization.” (p. 55)…

  • Dålig chef – hög sjukfrånvaro

    Det danska tjänstemannafacket FTF har presenterat en undersökning som visar att det finns ett klart samband mellan stress, hög sjukfrånvaro och dålig arbetsmiljö. En chef som inte tar hänsyn till den psykiska arbetsmiljön kan få sjukfrånvaron att stiga till tio gånger det normala (DN 2013-01-09). FTF:s ordförande Bente Sorgenfrey anser att arbetsledare måste ta den…

  • Henri Bortoft

    I have recently read two of Henri Bortoft’s books, The Wholeness of Nature: Goethe’s Way of Science and Taking Appearance Seriously: The Dynamic Way of Seeing in Goethe and European Thought. I am particularly fascinated by the dynamic way of seeing which is explained at length by Henri Bortoft. It’s important to take the ‘appearance’…

  • Balanspunkten

    Boken Theory U av Otto Scharmer handlar om hur man med öppet sinne, hjärta och vilja kan leda från framtiden så som den växer fram. Det som slår mig är att detta ytterst handlar om var man har sin balanspunkt,som individ och som team. Teamets balanspunkt är beroende av var teammedlemmarna har sina. Det slår…

  • The Source

    My search for better ways of working has now led me to Source: The Inner Path of Knowledge Creation. It’s a truly amazing book by Joseph Jaworski.

  • Self-directed learning

    Jeffrey Cufaude’s message in this excellent TED talk is that all learning is self-directed. Life’s a great teacher, are you a great student? Are you a lifelong learner?

  • The ‘totalitarian’ tendency of systems theory

    I have written in a previous post that systems thinking makes me uneasy. It’s treating organizations as machines, and people as machine parts, which I criticize. This is why I’m searching for better ways of working. I find Henri Bortoft’s view very interesting. He writes that: “Systems thinking is often presented as a revolution in…