Invulnerable Organisation

In most organisations, a new starter’s first weeks are handled as paperwork. A pass, a laptop, a lap of the office and a stack of forms to sign. That stretch of time is one of the rare moments when a…

Good to Great is probably the management book handed around a board table more often than any other over the past twenty-five years. Jim Collins, the American researcher behind it, studied hundreds of listed companies to isolate eleven that had…

You understand what invulnerability is and you have identified your fragilities. The hardest question is still ahead: where to start, in what order to advance and how to hold the line for years against the permanent pressure of the short…

You transform, you invest and you declare that you want to build for the long term. Your organisation stays structurally fragile all the same. The cause has nothing to do with a lack of will. It is a set of…

J’ai été sollicité pour intervenir en conférence sur l’invulnérabilité devant un panel d’industriels. La question qui m’a été posée était directe : est-ce que l’industrie française peut devenir invulnérable ? Elle mérite d’être prise au sérieux, et elle mérite surtout d’être découpée. La transition énergétique, la concurrence asiatique, l’instabilité géopolitique et l’accélération technologique forment une […]

La plupart des entreprises qui s’effondrent ne manquaient pas de sécurités. Procédures écrites et souvent labellisées, équipes stables, clients fidèles, systèmes éprouvés et validation centralisée. Tous les éléments d’une protection apparente. Leur faille se loge ailleurs. Elles confondent dispositifs visibles et solidité réelle, ce qui explique que leurs voyants au vert mesurent les mauvaises choses. […]

What skill, conviction or piece of expertise has your organisation deliberately abandoned in the past three years, while it was still working? Most of the leaders I put that question to name things that had already stopped working. A product…

What single failure would be enough to interrupt your operations for more than three months? And what alternative exists today, mobilisable with no fresh negotiation, to replace it? Those two questions can be answered in an hour, and they give…

In the last twelve months, has anyone been visibly rewarded for raising a problem that was inconvenient? And has anyone been penalised, without it ever being said out loud, for delivering bad news? Those two questions are worth every culture…

Two organisations respond to the same disruption inside forty-eight hours. Seen from the outside, they are equally fast. They are in radically different situations, and that difference will decide what happens to each of them at the next disruption. The…

The major crises an organisation goes through were almost always signalled internally before they happened. Operational people saw them, managers escalated them, abnormal data was produced. And nothing moved. That observation has become so familiar it has lost its force.…