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Archive for the ‘knowledge workers’ Category

Intrinsic Motivation: Doing Things Because They Matter

Thursday, March 4th, 2010

By William Seidman

I’m excited about Daniel Pink’s book Drive: The Surpising Truth About What Motivates Us.

Pink thinks “there’s a mismatch between what science knows and what business does.”  Intrinsic motivation, according to Pink, is what really motivates people. He calls autonomy, mastery, and purpose THE motivating forces, and the old carrot-and-stick approach “a lazy, dangerous ideology.”

Numerous good studies have shown that people want autonomy at work, and that it’s a better motivator than money. 

Drive is consistent with Cerebyte’s approach. We focus on the knowledge of an organization’s positive deviants. Social good is a powerful motivator for these workers. They’re driven from within and by the pleasure of doing things they care about — and that really matter, both to them and to their organization.

Posted in best practices, business, company culture, knowledge workers, organizational change, personal change, positive deviance, positive deviants | No Comments »

If Your Company Came with an Instruction Manual You Don’t Need “Strategy to Action in 10 Days”

Saturday, January 23rd, 2010

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By William Seidman

Ever wish your company had come with an instruction manual? Michael McCauley and I have written a book, Advantage Media has published it, and we’re excited. You can buy  “Strategy to Action in 10 Days: Creating High Performance Organizations”  directly from us, in bookstores, or on Amazon. There’s a Kindle edition, too.

Join our Facebook page and come with us as we travel to promote our book.

Ron Nakamoto, CEO of Strategic Financial, has praise:  ”I recommend Strategy to Action in 10 Days to any person interested in creating a high performance organization. It clearly illustrates how to break from the status quo and create a truly sustainable change. It is as much a practical guide as it is a game changer.”                              

We’re as excited about our book as we are about the many people who are using it to create real, lasting, and positive change in their organizations.

Posted in best practices, business, captology, knowledge workers, leadership, management consulting, optimization, organizational assessments, organizational change, organizational culture, persuasive technology, positive deviance, positive deviants, positive leadership, training, wisdom discovery, wisdom transfer | No Comments »

Re-energize and Passion-up: When Good Female (and Male) Managers Want Out

Friday, October 9th, 2009

By Rick Grbavac

Smart women in management make companies stronger and keeping them requires concentrated programs. This comes from the research that economist Sylvia Ann Hewlett performed in preparing her newest book, Top Talent: Keeping Performance Up When Business Is Down. In tough times, “high-powered women were more than twice as likely as men - 84 percent compared with 40 percent - to be seriously thinking” of leaving their companies.

In her article “Are Your Best Female Employees a Flight Risk?” Hewlett asserts that women were not thinking about leaving to spend more time with their families but, rather, because “they no longer felt challenged by or passionate about their work.” So companies such as Intel and Johnson and Johnson have created programs to address issues directly related to their senior management women. 

The idea in the article that jumped out at me was the idea of women managers losing their passion. I don’t think that this is a problem only for women executives. All knowledge workers from time to time need to re-energize and passion-up. The lull in business activity over the past year weighs heavily on all of us. It is time to re-vision, energize yourself and passion-up for this economic recovery.

Posted in best practices, company culture, employee retention, employee turnover, knowledge workers, management consulting, organizational culture | No Comments »

Don’t Panic - Optimize Your Attitude and Your Company

Wednesday, October 8th, 2008

By William Seidman

In the midst of chaos, maybe more now than ever, attitude matters. How you handle yourself and your company in the midst of worldwide financial turmoil now matters a lot. The tendency is for companies to react by immediately and drastically cutting costs, because costs are controllable and cutting them appears to solve part of the problem quickly. This can be destructive, though : don’t destroy the assets and capabilities you need for recovery.

A better way to think about the current downward spiral is to remember that instability requires optimization. Reducing costs may be part of that optimization, but so is improving productivity. If you haven’t already, identify your best people and commit to cutting costs and improving productivity. Optimization and a positive attitude are complementary.

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Posted in financial crisis, financial decision-making, knowledge workers, optimization | No Comments »

The Retiring Knowledge Worker Problem and the Loss of Critical Knowledge

Saturday, August 9th, 2008

By William Seidman

Are a lot of your company’s best people approaching retirement? The prospect of losing expertise at a high rate can be more than a little frightening. We get numerous inquiries about this.

Not many organizations take this seriously enough to fund programs or change daily routine sufficiently to prepare for this. Why? I think because it’s seen as a future problem, and not big or bad enough to tackle now. The executives who make the funding and priority decisions don’t want to plan around it - after all, they’ll be retired themselves before it hits, and they don’t want to rock the boat. It’s not a sudden crisis, but rather a slow loss of capability - sometimes so slow as to be barely noticeable.

An alternative way of framing this problem is to state it as a crisis in the protection of critical knowlege. This is what’s lost when great people retire, and what’s so important to preserve. David DeLong has said that “This is a huge problem for the nuclear industry, because it goes without saying that it can’t afford to make a single mistake.”

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Posted in business, knowledge workers, retirement, wisdom transfer | 3 Comments »

 
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