Organizational Design

My Nose, Other People’s Business

September 1, 2011

[(As I prepare for teaching the first class of the Business Technology Consulting Practicum, I've been reflecting on how to encourage the students to identify the unique gifts that they have and to consider how they'll bring these gifts to the teams and the projects they choose this year.  It's only fair, I think, for me to pony up [...]

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Changing the CEO at BP: It won’t make a difference, except where it will

July 27, 2010

For the past 90 days and counting, we knew this day was coming. You didn’t need an Irish bookmaker to tell you that Tony Hayward’s tenure as CEO of BP was coming to a close. Any organization facing a crisis like the BP Oil Spill would be likely to replace the guy at the helm. [...]

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Rearranging Chairs as an Act of Leadership

March 8, 2010

Certain members of my friends and family circle make fun of me tease me because I often rearrange the chairs at social, public and business gatherings. My beloved sister got a bit irked by my penchant for chair moving last month when, 20 minutes before her party started, she came into her living room to [...]

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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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When Will “Social Business” Become Social Change Business?

January 7, 2010

Just a quick rant here, triggered by and not quite in response to Rachel Happe‘s post on The Social Organization & Womenomics. In her post, Rachel wonders whether a truly ‘social’ organization or business might be more accommodating to the real-world, real-life pressures of managing work and family demands, not only for women but also [...]

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When the Organization Wears its Brand

July 31, 2009

The organization itself can wear the brand — it isn’t just the employees’ who can “wear the brand”. The organization’s physical being can (and should) express its brand and purpose. When an organization expresses its purpose through the way it is physically situating itself, I like to think of it as “whereing” the brand. From [...]

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Peek inside an Authentic Organization: Blogging at Berrett-Koehler

July 14, 2009

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 dwindling [...]

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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 if … Executive Compensation was based on Sustaining Organizational Authenticity?

January 3, 2009

I’m a big fan of linking compensation to business outcomes … as long as the amount of compensation isn’t vulgar and the right kinds of outcomes are part of the formula. So I was intrigued by a recent article about Ethics and Executive Compensation . Ed Konczal , writing about  over at Corporate Eye , [...]

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