10 episodes
The Nonsense Dialogues David and Randal
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- Business
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5.0 • 6 Ratings
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Welcome to the Nonsense Dialogues. "Dialogues" because we would like to think we sound like Socrates and Plato at the Academy. "Nonsense" because we think we sound like the great sceptics - Hume, Wittgenstein, Kant and so on. Actually, neither is true. Randal and David just like to argue about organisational and social psychological theory and practice in an invariably vain attempt to figure out what works and to complain about the myths, half-truths and just plain wrong s***e that pass as good science and good practice in the workplace. And we are just conceited and deluded enough to think that someone else may be interested in listening to us do so.
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We need to speak about Elon
Following from our previous episode on Bad Leaders, we look for lessons in leadership from the case study of Citizen Musk. David takes a psychologist’s perspective and examines if Elon’s self reported Autism Spectrum Disorder and his apparent narcissism offers both explanations for his combination of extraordinary achievements and appalling / idiosyncratic behaviours. Randal questions if he can be considered a leader at all - why not just an entrepreneur? We go on to debate neurodi...
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Bad Leaders - what can we learn from them?
In this episode we take a positive approach to discussing leadership development by considering what can we learn about good leadership from bad leaders. And also, can bad leaders grow into good ones? Elon is mentioned. But will it be as a bad leader or as a champion of the iterative fail and learn development model? Listen and find out! Our conclusions (spoiler alert) is that leadership has to be learned and that even initially inept leaders can become good ones with the right min...
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Episode 7 Prof Mark Williams - a Neuroscientist's view on psychometrics and leadership
We are very pleased to welcome Prof Mark Williams to the Nonsense Dialogues. Mark is the author of the best selling book “The Connected Species” and is a cognitive neuroscientist with an extensive international career. Randal invited him to present the neuro cognitive perspective of psychometric assessments with the obvious expectation that Mark would join him in denigrating the whole domain. Well, Mark sort of does do this but also provides a great range of insights into the challenges of tr...
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Episode 6 Is Mindfulness in the workplace snake oil, helpful or a distraction?
Randal has a lingering suspicion about anything that reminds him of cults, mysticism or good old fashioned snake oil. What has been attracting his sceptical attention of late are the various claims made by the proponents of Mindfulness for improving psychological health, well being and performance in the workplace. This episode is mostly Randal checking in on the evidence around these issues and best practice on mental health in the workplace with an authoritative practitioner in workpla...
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The Nostalgia Episode
Where Randal and David unfurl their inner Boomer and look fondly back on how leaders used to develop before those horrid consultants came along and ruined everything. Was leadership development much better in the past – slow, natural, organic and bespoke – compared to our modern, industrialised model of rapidly producing leaders in bulk by force moulding them into a generic corporate leadership template? But is this just a nostalgia driven view of preindustrial leadershi...
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Episode 4B Leadership Development that works better than all that stuff we've been criticising.
In episode 4 part A we talked s***e about leadership development practices and in this next episode, part 4B, we explore what we think effective leadership development programs should do to be actually effective in developing leadership for results. To save space, here is a summary of the episode as a series of lists. First list:Leadership programs should:Be tailored to the organisation’s strategy and people. Focused on non trivial strategic changes that leads to a distinctive ...