I just got off a plane and was watching an advertisement for Cirque du Soleil‘s upcoming shows. One of the shorts features a human pyramid doing jump rope. What amazing and skilful coordination and strength. Some people find solo skipping difficult enough, but it is a piece of cake compared to what I just saw.

It is easy to get things done … if we don’t need to work with other people.

I have long loved Karl Albrecht‘s axiom: “Intelligent people, when assembled into an organisation, will tend towards collective stupidity”. It continually fascinates me how challenging it seems to be to work effectively and efficiently with other people. Yes, we can design and implement good processes, systems and protocol – these are crucial – but at the end of the day, organisational effectiveness tends to be a function of the ability of people to operate together. It is not as easy as it should be for our efforts to add value rather than contribute to collective inefficiency.

Like you, I sit here on the brink of another year. At Ergo we have high expectations. Firstly for our clients – our expertise and commitments are to improve organisational effectiveness, whatever that looks like. We will continue to work hard to help leaders cultivate alignment of daily activity with organisational priorities.

And for us, in response to developments through 2008 we will be evolving … more on this later.

Meanwhile, have a great start to the year and give lots of thought to the collective intelligence of your team. Happy team skipping.