Category: Employees/Individuals
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Authentic Responses to Recession? Try Alternatives to Layoffs
The latest report of the Bureau of Labor Statistics states that in September 2008 alone, 2,269 companies executed a "mass layoff" . (A "mass layoff" is defined as firing at least 50 employees at one time from the organization.) This is the highest number of organizations executing a mass layoff since September of 2001. While…
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McCain Campaign Exploits the Race of Their Hired Help
The McCain Campaign has hired Obama supporters to work as as "paid volunteers ."Â As reported by Tom Baldwin in the UK Times, and picked up by The Huffington Post and the Daily Kos, the McCain Campaign is paying temp workers $10 an hour to go door to door handing out absentee ballot requests. Although…
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Mix Fake and Real, the Palin Way
People are hungry for authentic leaders and authentic organizations . Assessing an organization’s authenticity or a candidate’s authenticity is one way that we gauge where to place our trust. To entice people to trust us, we need to make them think the organization is authentic. Sometimes, we may even want to create "Fake Authenticity" in…
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4 Ways Palin Creates a Fake “Reality”
In my earlier post, Use Real Authenticity to Establish Fake Authenticity: Sarah Palin shows organizations how , I argue that Palin is a useful role model for organizations in the way that she has gone about creating "Fake Authenticity." Establishing Fake Authenticity has two steps, and in this post I’ll discuss Step 1: Creating a…
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Use Real Authenticity to Establish Fake Authenticity: Sarah Palin shows organizations how
Almost anywhere we look at this election season there’s something to learn about authenticity. This is especially true when we’re able to draw analogies between individuals and organizations. Watching the ways that individuals work to present themselves as authentic , we can learn tactics that organizations can use. Sarah Palin has been very effective at…
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Can an employee be “too authentic”?
“The guy was too authentic to do his job!” The employee in question worked for an organization that created “lifestyle” products for the action sports market. He worked as an editor and was responsible for updating the organization’s website every morning. The organization positioned itself as having authentic insight into the action sports community, because…
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You don’t have to ‘live the brand’ to give the brand
“Living the Brand”, an internally-focused branding strategy heralded by marketing gurus , is being touted in the March 2008 issue of the Harvard Business Review. HBR features a case discussion about how to achieve organizational authenticity at the fictional Hunsk motorcycles. Marty, Hunsk’s new marketing manager, is intent on reinvigorating Hunsk’s brand by making it…
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The New York Junior League: To be more authentic, practice what you preach
If an organization wants to be seen as inauthentic, all it needs to do is to say one thing and do another. When an organization creates a gap between ‘who we say we are’ and ‘how we act’, it creates a common and avoidable authenticity challenge. This authenticity challenge is made even worse when an…
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Work-Life Initiatives are the foundation of Authentic Organizations
Earlier this week I met with a group of organizational change advocates, each of whom is dedicated to reshaping the relationship between work and life. Work-Life issues per se aren’t really my gig, although I’ve had a fair amount of work-life conflict in my day as an employee and as a manager. However, I invited…