One in five CEOs shows signs of psychopathy according to a Forbes article I happened to read a couple of days ago. I was so shocked that I started researching and discovered a gazillion of papers, studies and literature on the so-called “corporate psychopathy”. The list of behaviors linked to this personality disorder knocked me out: lack of empathy, egocentrism, lack of remorse, manipulation, lies, superficial charm, … At first it seems that we are talking about the famous character of American Psycho, but the truth is that reading this list also makes us quickly think of some other boss that we have endured in the past. Or who maybe we are suffering now.

In a direct or indirect way, we all know the organizational havoc that corporate psychopaths cause with their management and how devastating their mistreatment is in the people who work with them. Some develop Stockholm syndrome, others believe they can make corporate psycopaths come to their senses (and die trying), others have to end up attending therapy, others silently endure all kinds of corporate harassment that make them live in constant panic and insecurity while they are at work. The sad reality is that, unless there is a criminal behavior forcing them to do so, corporate psychopaths are not going to submit to any type of treatment or behavioral therapy. Those individuals will not change. This means that dealing with a corporate psychopath will be constant wear and tear at all levels for all those people who have to put up with it. There is no salvation, so you better take your bag and leave. Or, if you decide that you don’t have a better place to go and that you can endure the situation (NLP betrays us so many times …), it is recommended to avoid the corporate psychopaths as much as possible and try to work in a parallel way (but I’m not sure if it’s realistic to think that this could happen).

However, the really disturbing thing about corporate psychopathy as a phenomenon is to consider how we have been able to create organizational environments where “growing” or “making a career” is linked to a lack of empathy, manipulation or the absence of remorse. Evidently, in these environments a corporate psychopath will behave like a fish in water and will always have the means to win. The solution is not to eliminate psychopaths. In fact, studies say that 1 in 200 people is. The solution is to focus on those other organizations where there is no hypocrisy or fear, where manipulation and lack of empathy are denounced and where there is no place for corporate psychopathy. Because those organizations exist. Let’s talk about them, let’s see what systems they implement, visit them and see them from the inside, talk to their people, give them the microphone, let’s replicate them. Stop praising and giving fake awards to companies that we know are in the hands of corporate psychopaths (because in the end we all know them). If we want psychologically safe environments and to solve one of the main causes of organizational mediocrity, let’s throw a cordon sanitaire around corporate psychopaths.

Every year in December I have a breakfast in my calendar scheduled many weeks in advance so that no one misses it. The guests are a group of friends who, once upon a time, worked together for the same company, in the same team. Even if the all of us left that organisation ages ago, we shaped a community that stick together through time, space and the careers of each one of us. Throughout the year we are in touch sharing projects, recommendations, information, news, profiles and gossips. To some extent, we could say that we still work together in one way or another, so when we meet physically once a year, it’s as if we’ve seen each other last week. What keeps this community together, active and thriving is that we always talk about today and tomorrow, but never about yesterday. The past is simply a temporary space where we met, but not what determines our relationship, which is always looking towards the future from the present. Actually, it is very difficult to build something sustainable which is constantly revolving around the past and its nostalgic narratives.

When we look at this from a business perspective, in some organisations I detect a behaviour that is a paradox: they are constantly looking at yesterday to build their today and their tomorrow. And when I say ‘they are constantly looking at yesterday’ I do not mean that they reflect on their legacy and their essence. I mean that they reuse nostalgic practices and call a bunch of business dinosaurs to solve challenges linked to the present and the future. With this idea in mind, they dust off tools and modus operandi that worked twenty or thirty years ago. They trust external advisors who made it big with their companies some decades ago (those companies are now closed or sold to some investors) and repeat over and over again the recipes that worked for them then (much of those recipes no longer makes sense in today’s world and some of them are not even legal anymore, but the old-fashioned advisors don’t even know it). They hire consultants (recommended by those business dinosaurs) who have been doing the same thing for 40 years with the same tools and approaches. And more practices like that. The result is always the same: strategies and ideas with an outdated and stale patina that do not provide a real, practical and sustainable solution. So, in the end, the organisation is left worse off than it was: with useless tools, having spent money on obsolete advisors and experts and with confused teams (which is an absolute drama for the business).

Let us not get lost in nostalgia and rely on logic: it is impossible to build forwards when you are constantly looking backwards. Let us use our common sense and, if we want to thrive, let us set our sights on today and tomorrow, without listening to a bunch of outdated business dinosaurs.

The year is coming to an end and, wherever we look, the world seems to have gone mad. We all know that we live in a scenario with tremendous challenges on multiple levels. How we choose to work with these challenges has a lot to do with the narrative we want to listen to and embrace. I feel as if we are at the height of a trend where polarisation and confrontation are (or someone wants them to be) the norm. The resulting tension leaves society (and organisations) confused, trapped in useless discussions, paralysed, hopeless and afraid of how things will develop in the future. But it is at times like this that, more than ever, we must stop asking our gpt for solutions and use that precious human resource we all have: critical thinking.

Jim Dator says that there is not just one future, but as many futures as we can imagine (thank you very much, Elisabet Rosselló). In a world where everything is upside down and where the unthinkable can happen (for better or for worse) it makes little sense to listen to predictions, all of them biased, that make us think that there is a predetermined future we must accept with resignation. In fact, the future is built day by day, in the present. It is built on the small daily choices we make and that we consider have no impact because we have been led to believe that what we, simple individuals, do does not matter. Of course it matters. It matters what social network you decide to be in or not. It matters whether or not you decide to share that comment that spreads hate even if at first it looks like a funny meme. It matters what you decide to spend your money and time on. It matters who you decide to support with your “like” and what that implies. No matter how we look at it (as a worker, as a citizen, as a neighbour, as a consumer, as a user, …), our small actions go one way or the other: either they feed the beast that talks about that predetermined future that someone has decided for us and that we must abide by, or they make us weave new possible futures where we all participate because we all have our space in this world.

With this scenario in mind, in 2025 I choose to continue weaving new futures tirelessly, without epic but with coherence. And I celebrate that every day, on my path, I am meeting more and more people who are aware of the key moment in which we live and who contribute at a social and organisational level to create better futures for all, where no one is left behind. Because, at the end of the day, this is what thriving is all about. So, I wish you a thriving 2025, shaker community! Huge thanks for building the future!

Before summer I went through the ‘heads and tails’ of an invoicing process with two clients. The ‘heads’ client was new and, before carrying out the service, the person who was going to manage my invoice contacted me, explained the invoicing process, apologised because it was very complex and, with exquisite kindness, walked me, through several e-mails, throughout the whole journey of registering me as a supplier, with all the necessary signatures and sending of documents. The ‘tails’ client was a different case: I held a session for them more than six months ago and my invoice payment was still pending. I contacted them by email to find out the status of the invoice. The person who was supposedly responsible for managing the invoice payment did not reply to a single one of the numerous e-mails I sent (one per week, for several weeks) and when, concerned about the ghosting I was receiving, I contacted the person who had contracted my service (who was not the same person who managed the invoice), she spoke to me about ‘issues with internal processes’ and she herself took charge of processing the payment following a parallel process. I never found out why the invoice had not been paid on time. The moral of the story is that there are people who make things happen DESPITE the processes, and other people who simply hide behind the processes and don’t bother to act (or answer supplier emails).

We have all complained endlessly about processes and tools. I am the first one doing so. According to Jung, I have a tendency towards extroversion and emotion that makes me feel a certain rejection towards everything procedural. Despite of this, I acknolewdge that, at a certain point, establishing a process or implementing a certain tool can be a great help in an organisation. However, we would all agree that designing good processes or implementing really useful and user-friendly tools and software is still one of the unfinished business in today’s tangled corporate world. Precisely for this reason, I don’t have high expectations from processes or tools, but I do have high expectations from the people who use them. You may not have the option of NOT USING that process or tool, but you do have the option of deciding how to use it or how to anticipate problems so that in the end a positive result is achieved and things move forward. When I see people who shrug their shoulders and make the limitations of processes and tools their excuse for things not happening, I think of the huge cost, financial and reputational, to their organisation. And I also think how terrible it must be for their colleagues to work with someone like that.

As things stand today, no organisation should be allowed to have people who don’t use their brains while working and believe that the essence of their job is to stick to the process. Well, it should not be allowed to have badly designed processes either. But that would be another post.