Great Examples

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

June 2, 2009

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 what [...]

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

April 27, 2009

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 smart [...]

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Tools for Authentic Organizations: Dotmocracy

March 23, 2009

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 being revealed [...]

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

February 19, 2009

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 total [...]

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An Agenda for Management Innovation: 25 Challenges

January 27, 2009

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. Reconstruct [...]

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Read Business Books — for charity!

January 24, 2009

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 last [...]

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Designing for Authenticity: More on the NY Jets

December 8, 2008

The December/January 2009 Issue of Fast Company has a lovely online slide-show of the NY Jets facility that follows up on the ideas in my post from September, on the 3 Things The New York Jets Can Teach You About Authenticity. ” The Jets demonstrate in their new facility ways that your organization can use its physical environment — the space where you put yourselves– to help it be more authentic.”

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…You can really see why New York  Jets EVP Sheehy would say: “Our building is the graduate school of football.”

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The Secret to Obama’s Social Media Success? The Campaign was one step behind.

November 5, 2008

Everybody’s talking about how Obama’s campaign has revolutionized politics , due in large part to the way that the Campaign employed social media. But as much as it’s true that the Obama Campaign was one step ahead of McCain (and anyone else) in using social media, it was also one step behind just about every [...]

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