Corporate Voodoo: Business Principles for Mavericks and Magicians - Softcover

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RENE CARAYOL is one of the world's leading authorities on business transformation. He has twenty years' experience at the top of major corporations including Pepsi, IPC Magazines and Marks and Spencer, many of them as a main board director. His management messages are essentially practical. But he also has the vision to translate that experience into a coherent, compelling and exciting philosophy.
Combining an insider's knowledge of the IT world, and long familiarity with the ways of the boardroom, Rene Carayol is uniquely qualified to guide corporations through the maze of the new world economy.
DAVID FIRTH is an international consultant, writer and conference speaker who works with individuals and companies intent on embracing the future. He is the author of The Corporate Fool, Smart Things to Know about Change and Smart Things to Know about People.

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Why do many companies find it so hard to escape the pull of the past? Why do many individuals keep resorting to learned behaviour, the habits and ideas that may have brought them success in the past, but which will leave them adrift in the fast-moving currents of the new economy? What is the spell that keeps them so immobilised? It's the Voodoo...
And what is the magic that can release us all - organisations and individuals, leaders and the led, employees and free agents, parents and children and candlestick makers - into a world of power, creativity, connection and achievement? It's also the Voodoo...
The power comes from knowing the difference...
VOODOO is suspicious of the neat and tidy answer
VOODOO inhabits the dreamworld
VOODOO asks: Why clarify the contradictions?
VOODOO asks: Are you thrilling yourself today?
VOODOO asks: Why predict the future when you can make it?
VOODOO says: Write your own most compelling story about you
VOODOO is not in the cornflakes
VOODOO asks: When was your last life-changing moment?
VOODOOcelebrates
VOODOO is not found in the kitchen at parties
VOODOO values the vibe
VOODOO asks: In what ways should you be fearful of yourself?
VOODOO connects to a powerful future
VOODOO says: If you are failing - fail fast
VOODOO catches you doing things right
VOODOO finishes off your sentences
VOODOO practitioners punch way above their weight
VOODOO is the goal scorer never the goalkeeper
VOODOO is more than mere magic, it's your magic

Aus dem Klappentext

When...
... the information Age has been galvanised by the internet
... your business is being driven toward online strategies
(but you're not always convinced it's through choice)
... the pace of development is accelerating and the noise levels are high
... the technology is more complex than ever
... and when your corporate body seems to be hyperventilating
... THAT'S WHEN THE VOODOO STARTS TO HAPPEN.
When ...
... you know that your people are not your greatest asset
... and your customers are not your king
... THAT'S WHEN THE VOODOO STARTS TO HAPPEN.
When...
...you've identified the opportunities of the new economy, but not on a significant commercial scale
...you've identified the opportunities, but lack the skills to exploit them
...you just can't decide what to do
... THAT'S WHEN THE VOODOO NEEDS TO HAPPEN.
Corporate Voodoo offers a framework for creating a Fast Business, either from scratch or when working with an old economy legacy organisation. And it extends its Fast Principles from work into the whole of life to answer the question: what are the sources of personal power, happiness and success in a Fast world?

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Introduction A message from Rene and David

Out of this world

Many Priests were either killed or imprisoned, and their shrines destroyed, because of the threat they posed to Euro-Christian/Muslim dominion. This forced some of the Dahomeans to form Vodou Orders and to create underground societies, in order to continue the veneration of their ancestors, and the worship of their powerful gods. - West African Dahomean Vodoun

The word Voodoo means mystery .

Voodoo was a secret or rather was driven into being a secret by those who would rather it didn t exist.

Voodoo was access to knowledge, power and enlightenment that the majority The establishment, those who were in a position of authority did not have.

From the 1600s until the close of the 18th Century, between eleven and fifteen million black people were removed from Africa by the slave trade.

Voodoo was a way for its practitioners to get back to something natural, instinctual, reverential - something earthy and elemental, something with a bite and a rhythm and a groove to it, something hot, something joyful, something that would make you shout out loud, something that could transport you back home.

Corporate Voodoo offers a similar promise.

In a world Life is a mystery

Business is a mystery too. 'The old certainties don t apply, we were told so often by the gurus of the 90s. Then the dotcom economy emerged and gave a huge, shocking glimpse of a world where the old certainties were not just unapplicable but blown away, really and truly blown away. And then, come August 2000, the dotcom bubble seemed to burst. But have we gone back to where we were, to what we knew before? No. We remain in a stressful, speeding world, breathless excitement and limitless possibility in one moment matched by breakdown, confusion and insecurity the next. It's a world crying out for peace and self- knowledge. The spirituality and self-help industry is on a roll. It's also, strangely, a world that is crying out for Magic. You d think, after what we've all been through recently, we'd want things more certain. But no.

Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. They were the last people you d expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious, because they just didn't hold with such nonsense. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone

The thing is, it's in the house. The strange and mysterious is in the house. The Dursleys who resist life in all its fullness are nevertheless the guardians of Harry, wizard of great fame, someone who once conquered death and crippled a devilish foe. The magic is with us, would we just see it.

Corporate Voodoo is the gateway to a magical world.

This Book This book is our way of sharing the 'secret knowledge - natural, instinctual, risky, thrilling, scary - that a few people are practicising today.

Let's join with Harry Potter and JK Rowling and call these people Initiates.

Their magic is a strange mixture, like Voodoo itself, of the old and the new. Initiates don t throw the baby out with the bath water, they don't have a modernist stance that dismisses any approach that was practicised in the past. Their rule is: work with what works.

Initiates follow the magic and make their businesses Fast. You'll see what some have done in CHAPTER ONE (though don t expect anything that feels like A Chapter in this book - just go with the flow, just keep listening, just keep using your imagination instead).

People who don't have the access to the mysterious world of magic, let's call them Muggles.

Muggles end up making their businesses Slow (CHAPTER TWO is the sorry tale of woe).

If more Muggles became Initiates, what implications would that have for our society, for education and government? That's the inquiry of CHAPTER THREE.

But only part of transformation comes through the work of analysis and vision. Corporate Voodoo shamelessly offers pragmatic advice on what to DO.

How can your company into a Fast one?

And how do you as an individual make the shift from Muggle to Initiate?

The two essential qualities that most separate Initiates from Muggles in our Voodoo world are their FEARLESSNESS and their attitude to OTHER HUMAN BEINGS.

Initiates of Corporate and Personal Voodoo are masters of two common human experiences.

They have a healthy attitude to failure, seeing it as rich in learning and opportunity. Muggles, on the other hand, engineer their efforts to avoid failure or the impact of failure, and thus compress their lives into what is known and predictable.

Initiates engage fully with life and all its surprises. They know that nothing - good, bad, failure, success - exists except as a label, a perspective of the mind, a point of view. Having faced fear as an ally, they are therefore grateful for the lessons of any experience. And they move on.

Muggles are scared of one thing more than any other: they are afraid of other human beings.

And they hide that fear behind a show of power. The history of organisations has been the history of subjugation, conformance, control and micro-management, not because of any scientific understanding that this produces the most efficient use of the human resource, but from a deep seated fear of what might be produced without such confining approaches. What if we let people be different? What if we let people be themselves, rather than what we expected themselves to be?

But for now, listen up. Can you hear that music playing..?

Voodoo is suspicious of the neat and tidy answer