Great Examples

Peek inside an Authentic Organization: Blogging at Berrett-Koehler

July 14, 2009

Tweet Years of following industries that create culture have left me with a special fondness for book publishers. Year after year, season after season, page after page, book publishers create objects that convey what I love most — great ideas. Increasingly, book publishers do this in an embattled industry, towards a customer base with a […]

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Resources for Authenticity: Being vs. Understanding

June 30, 2009

Tweet What resources can organizations draw on to create and sustain an authentic sense of “who they are”? My class with the Darden EMBA students on Saturday danced around the questions of “How do organizations ‘source’ their identity? and “How do organizations sustain their authenticity?” Even though we had a chance to discuss many other […]

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Brandividual In Action: Follow @cbarger to watch General Motors transform

June 2, 2009

Tweet Here’s your chance to see someone in the brandividual role taking action, over time, in the face of a big challenge. When I gave my talk about The Rise of Brandividuals at last week’s Corporate Reputation Conference, I used the example (well-known in social media circles) of @scottmonty of Ford Motor Company to illustrate […]

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Leading Authentically with Transparency: An interview/podcast with Paul Levy

April 27, 2009

Tweet Here’s a neat podcast interview with Paul Levy, CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, whose leadership approach to the need for dramatic cost-cutting we considered in the post Finding a leadership opportunity in alternatives to layoffs. This podcast interview offers a few additional insights, in part because the interviewer Catherine Bell asks some […]

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Tools for Authentic Organizations: Dotmocracy

March 23, 2009

Tweet The end of “business as usual”   Please, let us be coming to the end of “business as usual”. Conversations about whether MBA programs caused the financial crisis and what the future of capitalism should be suggest that ways of doing business that have long been seen as acceptable and even admirable are now […]

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What Remains of “the Organization” at the Rocky Mountain News?

March 6, 2009

Tweet Organizations are always more than an efficient way to control collective efforts, more than the aggregate of their individual members, and more than the sum of their productive parts. We can put people together to do something, but that doesn’t make them an organization. Those of us who study organizations, and who of us […]

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NewsFlash: Bankers in authentic organization get ‘secret’ bonuses that they actually deserve!

February 19, 2009

Tweet Among all the appropriate recriminations against (investment) bankers earning huge bonuses for running their financial institutions into the ground, it’s nice to hear about some bankers who might actually have earned their bonuses. As Martha Brannigan reports in the Miami Herald last weekend , bankers at The City National Bank of Florida received a […]

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An Agenda for Management Innovation: 25 Challenges

January 27, 2009

Tweet 1. Ensure that management’s work serves a higher purpose. Management, both in theory and practice, must orient itself to the achievement of noble, socially significant goals. 2. Fully embed the ideas of community and citizenship in management systems. There’s a need for processes and practices that reflect the interdependence of all stakeholder groups. 3. […]

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Read Business Books — for charity!

January 24, 2009

Tweet Here’s a great example of the concepts of "Co-donating", "Perkonomics", "Brand-butlering" and "Trynomics" — all at once. For anyone else who’s a business book junkie like me, this offer is hard to resist. It’s also a great example of being authentic. From the folks at ChangeThis and 800-CEO-READ : Continuing a tradition we began […]

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