For Purpose/For Profit Orgs

Peek inside an Authentic Organization: Blogging at Berrett-Koehler

July 14, 2009

Tweet 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 […]

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Reflective Executives, Where are you hiding?

July 9, 2009

Tweet One of my blogging e-mentors asked “If you had one question about blogging that you could have answered with a magic wand, what would that question be?” I’m a big fan of magic wand questions— I use them all the time with my kids, and so I took the bait. My one question? Where […]

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Where is my Values-Driven Landscaper?

April 19, 2009

Tweet I don’t get it. My “Tree Guy”, the fellow who sprays professionally applies pesticides to my hemlock hedge to prevent wooly adelgids from sucking the life out of them, came by to make sure we were renewing our contract with him. Some of his customers are switching to less expensive, less professional solutions, and […]

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A Benevolent Perfect Storm for Progressive Organizational Movements

April 16, 2009

Tweet “A Benevolent Perfect Storm.” Isn’t that a lovely image? It comes from David Ellwood, dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, as quoted by Steve Lohr in his NYTimes article “With Finance Disgraced, Which Career Will Be King?” Ellwood hopes that one outcome of the collapse of social and monetary incentives to take a […]

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Authenticity in 16 Words?

April 3, 2009

Tweet At soccer practice this week, I came up with a great idea for my 3rd/4th grade girls team. As coach, I have great ambitions for my team this Spring — I want them to do more than chase the ball all around the pitch whilst squealing.  So, I need to teach them to think […]

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Tools for Authentic Organizations: Dotmocracy

March 23, 2009

Tweet 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 […]

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

March 6, 2009

Tweet 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 […]

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Are Layoffs Unpatriotic?

February 25, 2009

Tweet A few weeks ago, Steven H. Korman published a provocative Open Letter to CEOs in the NYTimes and the Philadelphia Inquirer. Asking other CEOs to avoid layoffs, Korman urged corporate executives to focus less on protecting stock price, profits, and the short term, and focus more on protecting the people who are working hard […]

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Reputation, Beyond Authenticity

February 1, 2009

Tweet We’re delighted to feature a guest post from Mignon van Halderen, an expert on Organizational Reputation Management. Mignon is Assistant Professor at the Rotterdam School of Management (RSM), Erasmus University. At RSM, Mignon works in the Corporate Communication Centre where she combines teaching and applied research projects within the fields of Reputation Management and […]

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The Only Harvard Business Review Article You Need to Read

January 27, 2009

Tweet Rarely am I inspired by the Harvard Business Review. Despite Harvard Business Review’s efforts to revamp their print edition (with a zippier format, hip graphics and bite-size summaries) and to expand their online initiatives, HBR has always felt behind the times. Even when HBR has addressed issues critical to my own research or summarized […]

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