Comments on: You Don’t Control How the Ball is Served to You

By: Stephen

Stephen — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 14:18:01 +0000

Well, I don’t know if Bourdieu played tennis or not. I do agree that I was completely absorbed in the games at the time and I am making sense of this in retrospect. Although at the time I did see the result of the great return and go “Wow” to myself. My doubles partner was pleased too.

By: Chris Mowles

Chris Mowles — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 16:45:46 +0000

I suppose that the other way to think about this is from Bourdieu’s perspective, that in returning you were completely absorbed in the game and only made sense of what you had done in retrospect. Do you suppose that Bourdieu played tennis?
Best
Chris

By: Stephen

Stephen — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 05:25:05 +0000

Hi Jamie, thanks for your most interesting comment. This is an example of senior managers who are removed from the day to day work, implementing teamwork by decree (i.e. a 10 minute presentation) – which of course we know won’t work. The senior managers probably don’t even realise this is what they are doing – and might even be shocked that this is what it appears like.

Of course, for an organisation associated with the Olympics, a sports team analogy might be very appealing to senior managers – this way of doing it seems very simplistic.

I hope your Masters is going well.

Cheers, Stephen

By: Jamie

Jamie — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 13:28:40 +0000

ps excuse the spelling mistakes, i forgot to spell check my entry due to my excitement at the prospect of being a business athlete…

By: Jamie

Jamie — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 13:25:25 +0000

Hi Stephen, I thought you might appreciate this…

I have just come off a 10 min CEO leadership rallying call to members of the organisation’s talent community. We are closely associated with the 2012 olympics, hence the theme as we enter 1000 days to go is “enough of looking at the past, now look to the future”.

So, with that in mind, we are going to:-
- Be part of a “winning team”
- People aren’t on their own, they are part of a team
- We need to do like athletes do and train and strive for better results
- We need to strive to win
- We can achieve together
- We must take personal responsibility and never let a colleague fail
- We need to accelerate the pace of change

with that in mind, we are doing “Quarterly sprint” initiatives do be “better” and “quicker”

Whilst I feel slightly bemused by what my expected response to this should be (no doubt my colleagues and I will make our own sense over the next few days!) I must admit I began to wonder what was going through the leadership team’s mind when they come up with such an initiative. I believe the aspiration is geniune, to motivate and thus a positive morale building metaphor has been chosen. Unfortunately I can’t make any sense of it other than think “ah bless, he is trying” and we carry on as normal.

Love your site, (and Chris Rodgers!) as a newcomer to complexity via my MSc at Ashridge.