This weekend I had the pleasure of personally getting to know Simon L. Dolan in a work shop at the Georgetown University in Washington D.C. Prof. Dolan is known for numerous articles and books on value management and cultural re-engineering. For the last ten years he has been based at the ESADE Business School in Barcelona, Spain. I have self been teaching students the theory of value management using Prof. Dolan’s writings as curriculum, and was naturally eager to hear some gems of wisdom from Dolan himself…

This jazz-loving management guru is able to phrase complex management challenges into straight-forward and intuitively correct recipes for actions. One of his persistent arguments is that values are stronger than both objectives and instructions when it comes to making change happen. Because values are so central, he would label successful organizational change projects “cultural re-engineering”… and in order to really succeed with cultural re-engineering, one must be aware of the following axiom:

Competence is good. Passion alone is nothing.
Competence + Passion = Excellence.

Recommended reading: Dolan, S. L. and S. Garcia (2002). “Managing by Values – Cultural Redesign for Strategic Organizational Change at the Dawn of the Twenty-First Century.” The Journal of Management Development 21(2): 101-117.

For all his books and writings visit www.simondolan.com