Progressive Organizational Movements

What Women Want from Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg

February 7, 2012

Tweet Facebook has a gender problem. We want Sheryl Sandberg to fix it. Facebook has had a gender problem since its beginning. Now, with the publicity around Facebook’s upcoming IPO, business analysts, portfolio managers, potential investors, and feminist businesspeople are calling attention to the most glaring symptom of Facebook’s gender problem: Facebook has only white […]

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Communities of Commerce: Where the Marketplace is also the Meaning Place

January 11, 2012

Tweet Networks of people and organizations are usually either “markets” or “communities”. It bothers us that networks fit one or the other model of working together, because we envision something more –something both market and community —  in one network. We are often disappointed when markets don’t exhibit a commitment to any values other than […]

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Why Do Meritocracies Hurt Women?

November 7, 2011

Tweet When it comes to discriminating against women, you’d think that only sexist organizations would be involved.   But did you ever imagine that meritocracies would encourage managers to discriminate against women? Research conducted by Emilio Castilla and Stephen Benard, published last year in Administrative Science Quarterly, documents a disturbing dynamic that the authors call “The […]

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Don’t Tell Esty That Authenticity Is Getting “Old” — The Social Dynamic Between Crafters and Buyers is Timeless

October 27, 2011

Tweet “A deluge of vintage and artisanal products is now available online and through mass-market retailers. Has authenticity become just another fad?”   Here’s a quick response to today’s New York Times article by Emily Weinstein, All That Authenticity May Be Getting Old, about the flood of ‘authentic’, handmade and one-of-a-kind-ish items on the home […]

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Is Gamification a Cure for Entitlement?

October 19, 2011

Tweet What value is all this talk about gamification? It’s one thing to deploy game-design tactics to turn your for-profit services (like Foursquare or Hashable) into games. By playing games, folks actually will train themselves to use these products. More troubling to me is the idea of using gamification to redesign work tasks. Gamification and […]

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Take Our Daughters to Tech Events

October 11, 2011

Tweet What is the best, purest way to get more girls interested in tech (and more women employed in tech)? Get them deeply interested in what tech can do and what problems tech can help us solve. When girls (and boys) become genuinely interested and genuinely curious, they will pursue careers in tech not because […]

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The “New” Crisis of Meaning?

October 4, 2011

Tweet What’s up with the word “new” in the phrase “meaning is the new motivator”? From all corners of the interwebz conversation about ‘business’, I see mention of this idea that meaning at work is something new, something that we have just begun to desire. Seriously. It seems to come as a surprise, or as […]

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5 Ways That Systems of Engagement Bring Out Our Full Social Selves

June 22, 2011

Tweet Technology has a way of sucking the humanity right out of us. Consider how we describe, design and deploy ‘enterprise 2.0’ and work system technologies in our organizations: — When we talk about technology systems, we talk about machines, platforms, inputs and outputs.  We forget about values, emotion, flourishing, meaning and purpose. — When […]

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Make Distinctiveness Matter by Linking It To Organizational Purpose

June 14, 2011

Tweet Does it really matter if an organization is “distinctive”? When an organization’s distinctiveness (identity) is linked with the organization’s purpose (greater social goal), the organization’s unique qualities provide the unique resources needed to achieve that purpose. Organizational Distinctiveness is more than Positioning Managers often dismiss the concept of organizational “distinctiveness”, thinking that distinctiveness is […]

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Does Your Social Media Policy Create a Platform for Racism?

May 17, 2011

Tweet I bet you don’t think it does. I bet you think that your social media policy, and your ‘create a blog for our business using other people’s user-generated content’- approach, is impervious to racism masked as business advice, as research findings, or as interesting content. I bet that’s exactly what PsychologyToday.com thought, too. They’ve […]

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