Author: Phil Le-Brun

All organisations are perfectly aligned to get the results they get. —Stephen R. Covey, Educator and Author My first blog post on untangling your organisational hairball describes six focus areas to increase organisational agility. The first is to be highly aligned. As the Cheshire Cat remarked in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, “If you don’t know […]

You show me a successful complex system, and I will show you a system that has evolved through trial and error. —Tim Harford, Economist Read any contemporary article on organisations and within the first few sentences the word, “agile” appears at least once. Some articles suggest achieving agility with a new target operating model (TOM), […]

Transformation is not a destination; it’s a journey of continuous growth and self-discovery. —Tony Robbins I used to run regularly until life got in the way. I now intend to spend a boatload of money on fitness gear and fit running around all my other activities, probably starting in the new year. I anticipate being […]

One year ago we published our first research report on the role of Chief Data Officers (CDOs). The renowned Tom Davenport, in partnership with MIT Chief Data Officer and Information Quality Symposium (CDOIQ), was commissioned to conduct a global study of CDOs across industries, tenures, and stages of the data journey. At the time I […]

Never waste your time; it is too precious. There are never any guarantees we will have tomorrow. —Catherine Pulsifer, Author “I don’t have enough (fill in the blank)” is a common refrain in the face of new demands. It’s normally followed by that much-loved phrase “We need to prioritise.” I’ve observed that the challenge is […]

 “Once you make a decision, the universe conspires to make it happen.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson, essayist & philosopher   Thinking is hard; energy intensive even. Perhaps that’s the reason we obsess about food. One estimate indicates we make over 200 food-related decisions a day. Another popular internet statistic boldly states that the average human […]

We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run. —Roy Amara, Amara’s law I’m fascinated by the technological tipping points in history that have ignited the public’s imagination—the first TV broadcast, manned space flight, or video conference. Each of these events made a […]

“Stop trying to make everyone happy. You’re not chocolate” – Anon As a distant observer of the art of being a DJ, I believe I can make their jobs easier. My cunning plan is to replace all those complex sliders on their mixing decks with binary switches. Volume: yes or no? Bass: on or off? […]

With data at the centre of every application, process, and business decision, nearly every organisation I talk to describes a quest to become more data-driven to discover and act on insights rapidly. They know there is gold to be found within the troves of their data, but—frustratingly—it usually doesn’t materialise in a timely way for […]

In my customer conversations, Supply Chain Management (SCM) has become almost as constant a theme as people and agility. The last two years of pandemic and other disruptive events, along with the necessity to achieve sustainability objectives, have shocked companies into realising that they don’t necessarily know as much about their supply chains as they […]