Members’ connections to Orgs

My Nose, Other People’s Business

September 1, 2011

Tweet [(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 […]

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Social Intranet Design and Organizational Identity: Design for functionality and character

June 15, 2011

Tweet In a social organization, the design of digital social tools like intranets should reflect the organizational features that define the organization. These design features, no matter how subtle, can ‘auto-communicate’ and make salient the characteristics that matter most, and help organizations stay authentic. Especially in the digital workplace, our digital tools create an important […]

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A Surprising Reason Why Website Logins Matter

June 6, 2011

Tweet Why do we really need to log in to websites we use all the time? Why do those logins really matter, to us personally? Logins matter for three reasons– two that are predictable, and one that’s rather surprising. 1. Website logins improve the targeting of the site itself, in ways that benefit the organization. […]

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Re-creating Organizational Reputation Using Social Media: Not quite outdated ideas

January 14, 2011

Tweet As much as I love academic writing, conducting studies and developing theories, all of this work shares one acute problem — it takes forever to get from first draft to print. My just-published journal article with Adelaide King took about 8 years from idea to print, while the germinal paper on Organizational Identity & […]

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Insights about Authenticity from the Open Community Book Tour

December 22, 2010

Tweet I’m taking part in the virtual book tour and are doing to explore concepts from . Maddie and Lindy, along with their colleague Jamie Notter, have long been some of my favorite bloggers. “Even though” they write about communications strategies, and focus on a very specific type of organization (associations), their ideas are big, […]

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The Day “The Patrick” Disappeared: A story of lost identity

October 20, 2010

Tweet This is a story about a quirky little cafe that disappeared. While I lived in town, and for a few years after we moved, this cafe was a touchstone, a demonstration, of one of the experiences that made our small town so interesting. When the cafe changed just one little thing, it lost what […]

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3 Dangerous Assumptions in Corporate Work-Life Policy

October 12, 2010

Tweet Isn’t Corporate Work-Life policy great? Here we have a progressive set of programs and strategies that: Acknowledge that every employee is more than a worker, Recognize that she or he is also a ‘whole person’ with a life that extends outside the workplace, and Demonstrate that employees’ full lives should be respected and maybe […]

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Four Work-Life Challenges That Can Be Especially Difficult For Women of Color

August 19, 2010

Tweet A key premise of taking an explicitly inclusive approach to work-life issues is that people of different gender, social, cultural and racio-ethnic groups experience work-life challenges specific to their group. In my overview of research on work-life issues for women of color (see citation below), I’ve identified four types of work life challenges that […]

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BP’s Bravest Brandividual: What could be motivating Darryl Willis?

June 22, 2010

Tweet If you’ve been paying attention to BP’s “Making it right” newspaper advertising, or if you’ve seen BP’s recent television advertising, you’ve seen BP’s new Brandividual Darryl Willis. Aside from Tony Hayward, BP’s walking PR disaster CEO, Darryl Willis is the only person with a name shown by BPs own advertisements as being in charge […]

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Employee Branding at BP: Do snazzy uniforms protect the response teams?

June 16, 2010

Tweet Somebody at BP has been reading The Onion. BP has figured out that dressing their employees in groovy outfits can help build esprit, camaraderie and a even a sense of importance. Okay, I’m being snarky here… but I am wondering about the positive (and possibly negative) effects of the outfits these BP control center […]

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