Reflections

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

March 6, 2009

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 who [...]

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Tweet Yourself Like the Person You Want to Be

February 18, 2009

In nearly every corner of my blogging universe, someone is excited about Twitter. Other organizations & leadership bloggers, social media experts, branding experts, and even my info junkie friends are all finding something useful in the opportunity to share information in the super-condensed form of 140 characters. We think that Twitter is a tool for [...]

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“What if you could buy social justice?” or Does ‘values shopping’ really make a difference?

December 15, 2008

Can for-profit, for-purpose organizations make a difference, if we patronize them? Thinking about an organization’s authenticity invites us to examine simultaneously what the organization does and how it does it. When we think about organizations being authentic, we assume that organizations have their business purpose — the thing that they’re out there to "do", and [...]

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Obama’s Website Made Me Cry

September 23, 2008

It moved me from intent to action. It snuck past my shield of cynicism. It struck me at the core of what I care about. And it made me remember that what really connects people and organizations is the chance for them both to be authentic. What hooked me wasn’t the way the Campaign organization [...]

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The 3 Inviolable Rules of Authentic Organizations

September 17, 2008

While working on some ideas in the pipeline, I realized that I have a few absolutes about what defines when organizations are being authentic. I’ve tried to whittle these down to their basic descriptions and to take away a bit of the specificity that makes the ideas seem academic and/or too complex.  Here are these [...]

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Homophobia and (In)Authenticity at Omnicom: What can a leader do?

July 24, 2008

I am struggling to understand the pattern of reactions to a recent critique of an organization’s authenticity. Bob Garfield, writing in Monday’s (7/21) Advertising Age, has an Open Letter to Omnicom President-CEO John Wren, asking Wren to look at the contradiction between Omnicom’s public Statement on Corporate Responsibility and the homophobia represented in three recent [...]

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Which organization has the most integrity?

July 1, 2008

Last week’s AdAge online poll asked the simple question: Which organization has more integrity: J&J, Google or UPS? It seemed to me like a dumb question… … because the voting system doesn’t let people explain their reasoning and thus you can’t really understand how voters define integrity or make their decisions. Websites have these mini-polls [...]

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“Loving” my Authentic CSA? Good to know I’m not crazy….or alone!

June 9, 2008

Every now and then, when I think about what thinking about Authenticity does to me, I start to wonder if I’m crazy. Does anyone else get excited by “Girlcotts”, corporate shills, rice pudding, or bad branding plays? Well, here’s some perspective on my recent post, re: ‘Loving my CSA‘: Data point: When I googled the [...]

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It’s not that hard to recognize an organization’s authenticity. Even a child can do it.

February 16, 2008

“Mom, this company really shows their believingness.” So said my nine-year-old daughter. She had just noticed that the tag hanging from the T-shirt I gave her for Valentine’s Day was made from “100% post-consumer waste”. She already knew that the T-shirt was from a company called PositiviTee, that the graphic image printed on the T-shirt [...]

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115 Million Cups of Comfort: Kozy Shack Pudding

January 11, 2008

Have you ever been asked, as part of a personal visioning exercise, to write your own obituary? To all of those MBA students and executives who had to do just that in my leadership classes, I officially apologize. While I understand the merits of imagining what your life could have been like as a way [...]

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