Traditional management emphasizes strict control, clear hierarchies, and uniform processes. This approach, rooted in industrial-era thinking, promises efficiency and predictability. However, loose-coupling is a compelling alternative to traditional tightly-coupled approaches. In this piece, I revisit Karl Weick’s notion of loose-coupling in organizations and its impact on control and flexibility.| Leading Sapiens
Traditional authority—titles, commands, and rewards—has lost its edge in the modern workplace. What compels people is trust, respect, and admiration. This is the essence of referent power—a subtle but effective form of power that inspires loyalty and performance without coercion. It is effective but rare. In this| Leading Sapiens
Understanding and using power is key to effective leadership. The French-Raven model of power bases is a good primer on the different types of power. This post introduces this foundational framework of power and the 6 types: coercive, reward, legitimate, expert, referent, and information power. In 1959, social psychologists John| Leading Sapiens
Control was the dominant management paradigm in early twentieth century industrial factories. A century later, in many modern workplaces it continues to be dominant and mostly goes unquestioned. Often we don’t even realize that this is the case. But in knowledge work, context is a far more effective and| Leading Sapiens
Context is a powerful tool in leadership but goes underutilized and misunderstood - a deep dive into why mastering context is essential to effective leadership.| Leading Sapiens
How do you view your role of leader or manager? Is it as a chess master or a gardener? The lure of control Often unknowingly, leaders and managers suffer from the myopia of control. The underlying ethos is of knowing everything, solving problems directly and having everything under control. It's| Leading Sapiens
Paradoxes are built into the nature of management and leadership. Understanding them beforehand can be extremely useful in avoiding frustrations.| Leading Sapiens
Jeff Bezos is one of the clearest thinkers in modern business. This article captures all his mental models and thinking frameworks in one place.| Leading Sapiens
In The Fifth Discipline, there's a useful primer on systems thinking that I keep going back to. Senge calls it the laws of the fifth discipline, or in other words, laws of systems thinking. [1] Senge's ground-breaking book was published in the early 90s, and yet in the ensuing decades,| Leading Sapiens