Authentic or Not?

What’s your *personal* ROI as a Brandividual?

June 3, 2009

Tweet I’m not a wholehearted fan of personal branding. Some elements of applying a construct designed to sell products to the activity of selling oneself are a little questionable (as I argue in my Employee Branding research),  because personal branding can lead to an overly commercial understanding of the self. Quite simply, personal branding can […]

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Reason #238 that we should have another woman on the Supreme Court

May 19, 2009

Tweet From Feministing. com Really, Ann Friedman nails it. No sense in trying to recap this… just head to the full article. (captioned photo from Feministing) Supreme Court: Pregnancy discrimination A-OK! “Today our nation’s highest court ruled in AT&T v. Hulteen that women who took maternity leave and were discriminated against by AT&T are shit […]

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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 […]

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Which is worse: Being “Authentic & Bad” or being “Bad for Being InAuthentic”?

April 30, 2009

Tweet Before reading any further, let’s take a poll: How do our results compare to the findings of a more comprehensive annual survey of the reputations of US corporations? "America’s Most Least Reputable Companies" Reputation Institute just released its annual survey that determines the nation’s most respected companies. (The survey is summarized on Forbes.com.) Of […]

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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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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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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 […]

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Are Apologists for Layoffs Actually Just Bad Economists?

February 26, 2009

Tweet Here’s a post in honor of my friend Ian Ayres, a law & economics scholar who celebrates a big birthday today. Ian is constantly challenging academics of all stripes to stretch their thinking by asking themselves hypothetical questions. His favorite rhetorical tactic always seems to include two words: Why Not? Ian eschews any line […]

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NewsFlash: Bankers in authentic organization get ‘secret’ bonuses that they actually deserve!

February 19, 2009

Tweet Among all the appropriate recriminations against (investment) bankers earning huge bonuses for running their financial institutions into the ground, it’s nice to hear about some bankers who might actually have earned their bonuses. As Martha Brannigan reports in the Miami Herald last weekend , bankers at The City National Bank of Florida received a […]

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