Posts Tagged ‘organizational change’
Wednesday, December 24th, 2008
By Michael McCauley
Do you like Dilbert as much as I do? On December 21st Dilbert’s creator, Scott Adams, takes on organizational change in eight frames. Does this sound familiar? The consultant talks with the Human Resources (HR) director and talks about how he will do an initial diagnostic review, and then form centers of excellence. Next, he will consolidate shared services to drive continuous improvement. In this scenario the organization will be transformed by translating initiatives into actionable tasks.
Of course since Adams is lampooning, by the seventh frame the joke is on the HR director, and on the tired conventional wisdom he’s been spouting.
This is part of why I continue to be excited by the freshness of Kim Cameron’s ideas. Cameron suggests that leaders actively promote a positive climate, positive communications, positive relationships, and positive meaning in their organizations. He posits that this philosophy and its practice will drive growth resulting from people performing at a much higher level.
Does it work? We have found that it does. People and organizations change more quickly and more predictably. The changes are positive and the organization thrives.
Tags: Dilbert, HR, human resources, Kim Cameron, organizational change, positive communications, positive leadership, positive meaning, positive relationships, Scott Adams
Posted in affirmations, best practices, management consulting, optimization, organizational change, positive leadership | No Comments »
Tuesday, November 4th, 2008
By William Seidman
I recently revisited the work of Harvard Business School Professor John Kotter. He’s a prolific author and his latest work, A Sense of Urgency, focuses on urgency in organizations. He discusses the difference between urgency and activity, and how creating a sense of urgency is beneficial to a work environment.
Dr. Kotter has interesting ideas - he points out that activity is not the same as productivity. Activity can be unfocused while urgency is the act of moving deliberately and quickly forward to a specific goal. In tough economic times, activity tend to increase while urgency decreases. Panic sets in and the sense of urgency is lost. This unraveling can be avoided, and an organization can actually come out much stronger. The key for organizations is to retain a clear approach to optimizing in the face of pressure: maintan a sense of urgency versus blind activity.
Tags: A Sense of Urgency, Harvard Business School, John Kotter, organizational change, urgency versus activity
Posted in business, management consulting, urgency in organizations | No Comments »
Tuesday, October 28th, 2008
By William Seidman
Last week we met with some PR folks. Like so many people we talk with, they were compelled to categorize us. We were a “training system,” a “knowledge management system,” a “project management system.”
It’s human to categorize - but what we do at Cerebyte is both “all of the above” and “none of the above.” Remember heating food before microwave ovens? In the old days, the pot was either on the stove or in the oven. It took a while, but eventually the container got hot. Then along comes the microwave oven - which heated food nearly instantly without also heating the container.
It didn’t make sense so we had to find out how this worked! Today no one thinks twice about the way microwave ovens work - they don’t want to, and don’t need to.
Using the microwave analogy, we want to create images of what people experience with our system - which is, in fact, persuasive technology. We’d love to be the “microwave” of personal and organizational change. People won’t need to know how or just why it works - just that it DOES work. At Stanford University there’s some exciting research into captology, the design, theory, and analysis of persuasive technologies.
Tags: captology, organizational change, personal change, persuasive
Posted in captology, organizational change, personal change, persuasive technology | No Comments »
Tuesday, October 7th, 2008
By William Seidman
It might seem impossible, at this moment in our financial history, to think about more than money. But recently I conducted wisdom discovery with some great people: Lee Brower and his team from Quadrant Living; Albert Perkins and Michelangelo “Miki” Domine from CNRG Corp, and Ron Nakamoto from Strategic Financial. Our focus was to develop a program to make Quadrant Living’s program available and accessible to a wide range of people.
Quadrant Living has been very good at getting people with money to think about more than just money, by guiding them to increase the value they place on family, education, and contributions to their community. Cerebyte and QL share a positive focus and both stress gaining value from assets you or your organization already has.
Tags: Albert Perkins, CNRG Corp., Lee Brower, Miki Domine, money, organizational change, positive thinking, Quadrant Living, Ron Nakamoto, Strategic Financial, wisdom discovery
Posted in best practices, financial crisis, organizational assessments, organizational change, wisdom discovery | No Comments »
Thursday, September 11th, 2008
By Michael McCauley Often when a company’s leadership decides that changes are needed, the intense focus is on what’s wrong. What’s right and good is often undervalued. You might expect that this negative focus is a good thing for advanced strategic management, because isn’t acknowledging what’s wrong vitally important to being able to change? Well, not always. The positive energy, good feelings, and goodwill that results from considering, even concentrating, on what’s being done WELL is often a very valuable asset for corporate culture. This speaks to just this condundrum. It discusses why a negative company culture can be so destructive and because “culture eats strategy for lunch” (Dick Clark, Merck CEO said that), positive focus on what’s worth keeping is such an important thing.
Tags: company culture, company leadership, goodwill, organizational change, positive thinking
Posted in organizational change, positive deviance | No Comments »
Tuesday, July 29th, 2008
By William Seidman
We get asked if our solution is “sustainable.” Organizational change is sustainable if the people in the organization are committed to taking responsibility for their success. That commitment to change has incredible energy in it. Wisdom transfer isn’t magic - it takes hard work and a degree of diligence. Sustaining the changes is the organization’s charge. We give the tools and the support, but the group must use them well, and over time.
Tags: business, organizational change, wisdom transfer
Posted in business, organizational change, wisdom transfer | No Comments »
Sunday, July 27th, 2008
By William Seidman
I’m in Malaysia now, working with a great team that’s under incredible pressure. Each member recognizes that they should be thinking bigger and longer-term, but need someone - a catalyst if not a leader - to make it all happen. As Michael Gerber wrote in his now-classic book ( the updated version is “The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work”), sometimes you must “work on the business, not just in the business.” But working on the business requires commitment and strength of organizational character that’s hard to find. As in any important relationship, the organization must make a commitment to its own future to have the energy and the discipline required to make real and lasting change.
Tags: business, Malaysia, Michael Gerber, organizational change, The E-Myth Revisited
Posted in business, organizational change, personal change | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008
By William Seidman
Can the science we use to effect organizational change be used in other cultures and in other languages? Do differences in negotiating styles, teams and hierarchies, and verbal and nonverbal ways of communicating influence a company’s ability to do things differently, and have the changes “stick”?
I’m working on a change initiative for a large multinational in Malaysia, Hong Kong, and Japan this summer. It’a a great way to test the mettle of positive deviance, fair process, and knowledge transfer - based on neuroscience - in translation and with some cultural barriers that we’ll be working with. In Hong Kong there are language differences between Cantonese and Mandarin.
Fair process has three principles: Engagement, Explanation, and Expectation Clarity. There seems to be a universal sense of honor and dignity created when a change process relies on the science of fair process. This has been especially powerful in work I’ve done with Japanese and Chinese companies previously.
A foundation of neuroscience, that “neurons that fire together, wire together,” would seem to predict that the approach will work.
Tags: business, communication styles, fair process, Hong Kong, Japan, Malaysia, negotiating styles, neuroscience, organizational change
Posted in business, fair process, organizational change | No Comments »
Sunday, July 13th, 2008
By William Seidman
If you’ve recently implemented change in your company - congratulations! But now what? Ensuring that change “sticks” is the tough part. Focused positive thinking has been shown to actually work. (more…)
Tags: behavioral change, management training, neuroleadership, organizational change, positive thinking
Posted in neuroleadership | 4 Comments »
