Organizational Design

What Keeps Women From Moving Up the Ladder? Not “experience”, but corporate laziness

February 24, 2010

This just in from Forbes Magazine — yet another article about why “women” don’t get promoted. (hat tip to my friend @ShaunRSmith) Orit Gadiesh and Julie Coffman, in Why Women Don’t Make It Up The Ladder summarize several of the arguments that are advanced to explain why so few women, relative to men, get promoted [...]

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Does the iPad Signal a Change in Apple’s Core Brand & Identity?

February 2, 2010

If products reflect an organization’s values and an organization’s identity, does Apple’s new iPad tell us something about where Apple as a company is headed? And, if that’s where Apple is going, do we all want to go there too? Here’s a proposition: Apple as an organization is changing, from an organization that’s “about” creativity [...]

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Work-Life Initiatives Are the Foundation of Authentic Organizations

January 29, 2010

Earlier this week I met with a group of organizational change advocates, each of whom is dedicated to reshaping the relationship between work and life. Work-Life issues per se aren’t really my gig, although I’ve had a fair amount of work-life conflict in my day as an employee and as a manager. However, I invited [...]

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Corporations as Persons: Steven Colbert explains this bad idea

January 22, 2010

[Jan 21: In light of yesterday's Supreme Court Decision, I'm re-posting this serious & pop-culture critique of the anti-democratic argument that Corporations Are People. Scott Klinger writing over at Alternet, sets out what it would/should mean for corporations really to be treated as "persons" and thus have the same responsibilities as people too. Me, I'd [...]

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Work-Life Fit is an Enterprise 2.0 Solution

January 19, 2010

This headline could be puzzling…  What could possible make Work-Life Fit and Enterprise 2.0 relevant to each other? After all, one is a challenge of the modern workplace, and the other is a challenge to the modern workplace. They come together because both concepts ask us to redesign our organizations. Although Enterprise 2.0 and Work-Life [...]

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Networks and The Myth of Flattening Organizations

January 14, 2010

I was excited to hear from a few social media/Enterprise 2.0 advocates after my post last week asking When will social business become social change business? Special thanks to Jon Husband of Wirearchy, who not only confirmed that he has a revolutionary agenda behind his networked models of organizing but who also sent me some [...]

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Organizational Change Using Authentic Attributes

December 14, 2009

My friend Charles just took a new job ‘making rain’ for a creative services agency. The agency is well-known in its industry for producing top-quality product, but its business isn’t growing. Why has their business stopped growing? Charles thinks that the problem with the agency is that it is “Too German”. What does it mean [...]

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7 Signs of Change at Comcast: What I’ve found so far

October 28, 2009

It looks like Comcast is, in fact, working to integrate its social media efforts into its internal systems. This integration of their customer contact efforts, along with internal leadership initiatives, is powering overall organizational change. In my previous post, I questioned whether people were assuming cultural change at Comcast simply because their CEO claimed change [...]

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Is Twitter is Really Changing Comcast’s Culture?: 7 Signs to Look For

October 26, 2009

If you read TechCruch or pay attention to social media gurus, you might think that Comcast was really making progress towards becoming more customer-oriented. We hear a lot about Frank Eliason and his leadership in getting Comcast onto social media to respond to customer complaints that, increasingly, are being voiced online. With @ComcastCares on Twitter, [...]

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Burned by Inauthenticity

September 14, 2009

I had almost forgotten the details of our family’s bad experience with a national espresso chain after my daughter was burned by a grande hot tea on her way to the Big Apple Circus. Then I saw this article about a toddler being burned by a hot hash brown at Dunkin Donuts, and my whole [...]

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