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Control: The Most Potent Addiction of All

Today’s Strategic Alignment Journal post in two sentences: The need for control can create a sense of security while gradually increasing dependence, limiting initiative and reinforcing the very conditions we’re trying to prevent. Recognizing the boundaries of our responsibility and influence allows us to make more appropriate decisions without assuming that every outcome must be…
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Feeding the Cobra: Why Our Fixes Backfire

Today’s Strategic Alignment Journal post in two sentences: Organizations sometimes introduce solutions that unintentionally encourage the very behaviors or conditions they are trying to eliminate, leaving problems unresolved or even making them worse. Understanding how interventions influence behavior, incentives and organizational practices is essential to avoiding unintended consequences and recognizing when the solution itself has…
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“More than physical pain, I fear humiliation…”
The title of today’s post is the line spoken by Duncan, the insecure CEO of an up-and-coming data-mining company called Hypergnosis, during a therapy session with Joanne in the AMC series Audacity. While the darkly comedic drama eventually reveals other fractures moving beneath his life…an unraveling marriage, unresolved father wounds, mounting emotional instability…the statement itself…
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What we Think of as an Advantage or Disadvantage isn’t Always Correct
A business with more money is assumed to be in a stronger position than the one struggling to make every dollar stretch, yet sometimes the opposite becomes true over time because constraints force a level of attentiveness that abundance does not require. Meanwhile larger organizations can slowly become insulated from the consequences of poor thinking…

