Category: Organizational Design
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Is The Daily Show Sexist? Use the 6 Degrees of Sexism Test to judge for yourself
The media storm surrounding Jezebel’s claim that The Daily Show is sexist has tangled up our common assumptions about what does or does not make an organization sexist. Whether or not an organization is “sexist”–or for that matter racist, classist, sustainable, Mormon, Black, etc. – matters to the organization’s members and to its audience. Our…
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Misleading Image for Army: New York Times, PowerPoint and Complexity Fail
Was anyone else annoyed by the use of this image, below, on the front page of today’s New York Times? The image is being used to illustrate an article on “death by Powerpoint“, or the overuse of linear, bullet-pointed presentation methods in today’s information-drenched warfare. I have no quarrel with the reporting in the article…
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What Keeps Women From Moving Up the Ladder? Not “experience”, but corporate laziness
This just in from Forbes Magazine — yet another article about why “women” don’t get promoted. (hat tip to my friend @ShaunRSmith) Orit Gadiesh and Julie Coffman, in Why Women Don’t Make It Up The Ladder summarize several of the arguments that are advanced to explain why so few women, relative to men, get promoted…
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Does the iPad Signal a Change in Apple’s Core Brand & Identity?
If products reflect an organization’s values and an organization’s identity, does Apple’s new iPad tell us something about where Apple as a company is headed? And, if that’s where Apple is going, do we all want to go there too? Here’s a proposition: Apple as an organization is changing, from an organization that’s “about” creativity…
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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…
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Corporations as Persons: Steven Colbert explains this bad idea
[Jan 21: In light of yesterday’s Supreme Court Decision, I’m re-posting this serious & pop-culture critique of the anti-democratic argument that Corporations Are People. Scott Klinger writing over at Alternet, sets out what it would/should mean for corporations really to be treated as “persons” and thus have the same responsibilities as people too. Me, I’d…
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Organizational Change Using Authentic Attributes
My friend Charles just took a new job ‘making rain’ for a creative services agency. The agency is well-known in its industry for producing top-quality product, but its business isn’t growing. Why has their business stopped growing? Charles thinks that the problem with the agency is that it is “Too German”. What does it mean…