Creating Authenticity

Local Heartbreak, bankruptcy style

April 24, 2009

Tweet Sometimes organizations fail, and you just don’t care that much. Other times organizations fail, and you wonder why you care SO much. It’s a failure in the second category that’s making me sad today. With Fountains of Wayne, Route 46 sustains its authenticity as the scenic route from the Hudson to the Delaware. Without […]

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Raw Emotion, UnCooked Truth, and the Space Between “Fake” and “Real”

April 14, 2009

Tweet My colleagues at OrgTheory are celebrating the award of Guggenheim fellowships to some great sociologists, and they mention one of my favorites, Joshua Gamson. I was reminded of how much I enjoyed Gamson’s first book, Freaks Talk Back, because Gamson’s analysis of tabloid talk shows is laced with interesting questions and examples of strategic […]

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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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7 Tips for Rendering Authenticity Through Social Media

March 12, 2009

Tweet As part of a presentation I’m giving on “Rendering Authenticity Through Social Media, ” I’ve been distilling advice for from around the online conversation on how organizations can use social media to present themselves authentically. The audience will be a group of managers (practitioners, not professors) who are not themselves directly responsible for social […]

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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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Tweet Yourself Like the Person You Want to Be

February 18, 2009

Tweet 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 […]

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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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