Employees/Individuals

Which is preferable, Layoffs or Alternatives to Layoffs?

May 4, 2009

Tweet My esteemed colleague and fellow Michigan PhD alum, Aneil Mishra, is a well-known expert on the ‘softer’ organizational affects of downsizing and layoffs: morale, commitment and trust. Writing today about furloughs at GM on his blog Total Trust, Aneil mentions that "In our research on downsizing, we’ve found that across-the-board cost cutting like this […]

Read the full article →

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

April 27, 2009

Tweet 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 […]

Read the full article →

Why do some CEOs “leave money on the table” when they choose layoffs?

April 20, 2009

Tweet In my MBA classes, we called it "Leaving Money On The Table". In business practice, we call it a "missed opportunity". Managers "leave money on the table" when they fail to ask for something that a customer will give them readily and without extra charge. Managers "leave money on the table" when they take […]

Read the full article →

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 […]

Read the full article →

Soccer in 16 Words

April 1, 2009

Tweet Remember– this is for 8 year olds! The goal is to simplify and clarify what you do once you have the ball, depending on your assigned role. The bolded words are the words I’ve asked the girls to learn and use. So, without further ado: Soccer in 16 Words Strikers: Center & Score! Midfielders: […]

Read the full article →

Hey “Working” Mom– getting laid off is a “relief”. Really.

March 27, 2009

Tweet It is disturbing to see that the effects of employers’ responses to the economic crisis are not being distributed equally throughout our population. While there’s a bit of controversy over who has it worse, it’s pretty clear that due to the structure of our economy, some groups are being laid off  proportionally more than […]

Read the full article →

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 […]

Read the full article →

Flexible Downsizing and Sexism: Should we be worried?

March 10, 2009

Tweet There is a movement afoot to link organizations’ responses to the economic crisis to larger social goals, like sustainability and work family balance. Anytime we can get two valuable outcomes for one business decision, "that’s a good thing." Often, however, business decisions made for one reason have unintended repercussions. Take the movement towards alternatives […]

Read the full article →

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 […]

Read the full article →

The Titanic’s Band: Responsibility at the Rocky Mountain News

March 4, 2009

Tweet The Rocky Mountain News, one of Denver, Colorado’s two daily newspapers, closed on Feb 27 after nearly 150 years of operation. While the print edition is completely gone, and the signs were removed from the building just two days after the closing was announced, the Rocky Mountain News online edition is (still) up, running […]

Read the full article →