Progressive Organizational Movements

“Add Women and Stir” Won’t Keep Women In Tech

May 16, 2012

How do we get and keep more women in technology-related careers? How do we increase the number of women creators, makers, designers, and coders? Why not just add more women to the mix, and go from there?  When all we do is “add women and stir”, without simultaneously and deliberately changing that system, we aren’t going to succeed. [...]

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Sharing Success in Etsy’s Community of Commerce

March 30, 2012

The most promising feature of a community of commerce is the way that members in the community work to ensure each other’s success, even if doing that costs them something. When members in a community help each other, we often don’t notice that there is a real cost in giving that help. Instead, because we [...]

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Is there a Business Model behind that Values Statement?

March 1, 2012

There are many fledgling businesses that have laudable intent and shaky commercial foundations.   This is a problem because, in an ideal world, the businesses that stand for values we share should also be able to sustain themselves as businesses. That’s the key premise underneath social entrepreneurship and conscious capitalism. Purpose-driven organizations need compelling values, but they also need coherent [...]

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What Women Want from Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg

February 7, 2012

Facebook has a gender problem. We want Sheryl Sandberg to fix it. Facebook has had a gender problem since its beginning. Now, with the publicity around Facebook’s upcoming IPO, business analysts, portfolio managers, potential investors, and feminist businesspeople are calling attention to the most glaring symptom of Facebook’s gender problem: Facebook has only white men [...]

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Communities of Commerce: Where the Marketplace is also the Meaning Place

January 11, 2012

Networks of people and organizations are usually either “markets” or “communities”. It bothers us that networks fit one or the other model of working together, because we envision something more –something both market and community –  in one network. We are often disappointed when markets don’t exhibit a commitment to any values other than maximizing [...]

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Why Do Meritocracies Hurt Women?

November 7, 2011

When it comes to discriminating against women, you’d think that only sexist organizations would be involved.   But did you ever imagine that meritocracies would encourage managers to discriminate against women? Research conducted by Emilio Castilla and Stephen Benard, published last year in Administrative Science Quarterly, documents a disturbing dynamic that the authors call “The Paradox [...]

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Don’t Tell Esty That Authenticity Is Getting “Old” — The Social Dynamic Between Crafters and Buyers is Timeless

October 27, 2011

“A deluge of vintage and artisanal products is now available online and through mass-market retailers. Has authenticity become just another fad?”   Here’s a quick response to today’s New York Times article by Emily Weinstein, All That Authenticity May Be Getting Old, about the flood of ‘authentic’, handmade and one-of-a-kind-ish items on the home decor [...]

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Is Gamification a Cure for Entitlement?

October 19, 2011

What value is all this talk about gamification? It’s one thing to deploy game-design tactics to turn your for-profit services (like Foursquare or Hashable) into games. By playing games, folks actually will train themselves to use these products. More troubling to me is the idea of using gamification to redesign work tasks. Gamification and Work [...]

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Take Our Daughters to Tech Events

October 11, 2011

What is the best, purest way to get more girls interested in tech (and more women employed in tech)? Get them deeply interested in what tech can do and what problems tech can help us solve. When girls (and boys) become genuinely interested and genuinely curious, they will pursue careers in tech not because ‘that’s [...]

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