Readers’ Question: Can we shift to more authentic communication?

February 11, 2010

Tweet Last weekend Bob Sutton and I got a pair of emails from readers who are frustrated by a specific kind of inauthentic participation within their organization. They wanted some ideas on how to name this behavior, in the hopes that labeling the behavior would help them get a handle on it. Here’s a snippet […]

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Ponies in the Snow

February 10, 2010

Tweet Heaven help you if you are a business that I care about, even if your business is no business of mine. I just finished up a 24-hour email exchange with the folks at the Virginia Camp where my daughters and I do our mother-daughter riding weekends, and where they’ll be going to camp this […]

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Girl Scouts: Limiting Cookie Sales by Strengthening Their Brand?

February 8, 2010

Tweet Good news for you and your Thin Mint Addiction! The Girl Scouts are making it easy to find out where those dang cookies are being sold! (Now I don’t have to drive to Walmart and get the cheaper but less meaningful generic imitations!) The Girl Scouts have an online cookie locator– just type in […]

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Does the iPad Signal a Change in Apple’s Core Brand & Identity?

February 2, 2010

Tweet 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” […]

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Work-Life Initiatives Are the Foundation of Authentic Organizations

January 29, 2010

Tweet 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 […]

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The (Feminist) Business Bloggers’ Lament

January 26, 2010

Tweet In the past several weeks I’ve been working with two different groups of businesswomen, developing social-media based movements to advance social change in and around the workplace. Conversations with these women have been intellectually challenging, inspiring and empowering. And they have also been oddly confessional, about a problem that — in my opinion — […]

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How Layoffs Have Evolved: From “Office Space” to “Up In The Air”

January 25, 2010

Tweet In the decade since its release, the movie Office Space has dramatized the corporate best of work-life dystopia. In Office Space, we’ve got the Lumberg, the red stapler, the TPS Reports, a bad case of the Mondays, a little flair, and of course, “the Bobs”. Oh, the Bobs, those clueless, bumbling, omniscient consultants from […]

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Corporations as Persons: Steven Colbert explains this bad idea

January 22, 2010

Tweet [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, […]

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Authentic Twitter: Are exclamation points unprofessional?

January 20, 2010

Tweet Exclamation Points: An Authenticity Issue Last week, I got a bit of crap from I was chided by one of my colleagues for sending a 4-line email with three (three!!) exclamation points. This colleague also pointed out that I occasionally sprinkle my tweets with exclamation points. This is a problem. These exclamation points, s/he […]

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Work-Life Fit is an Enterprise 2.0 Solution

January 19, 2010

Tweet This headline could be puzzling…  What could possible make Work-Life Fit and Enterprise 2.0 relevant to each other? After all, one is a challenge of the modern workplace, and the other is a challenge to the modern workplace. They come together because both concepts ask us to redesign our organizations. Although Enterprise 2.0 and […]

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