Category: Employees/Individuals
-
Which is preferable, Layoffs or Alternatives to Layoffs?
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 (specifically,…
-
Leading Authentically with Transparency: An interview/podcast with Paul Levy
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 smart…
-
Why do some CEOs “leave money on the table” when they choose layoffs?
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 an…
-
Soccer in 16 Words
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: Move…
-
Hey “Working” Mom– getting laid off is a “relief”. Really.
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 other…
-
Tools for Authentic Organizations: Dotmocracy
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…
-
Flexible Downsizing and Sexism: Should we be worried?
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 to…
-
What Remains of “the Organization” at the Rocky Mountain News?
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 who…
-
The Titanic’s Band: Responsibility at the Rocky Mountain News
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 many…