Organisational culture represents the collective values, beliefs and principles of organisational members and is a product of such factors as history, product, market, technology, strategy, type of employees, management style, and national culture.
Culture includes the organisation’s vision, values, norms, systems, symbols, language, assumptions, environment, location, beliefs, and habits.
A colleague in an organisation I partner with recently asked me for a CV for the website. So far, so normal. Then they asked for a list of presentations – something I've never really pulled together before. So I delved through the conference folders to find those times when I've Read more…
I'm on the train to Gatwick Airport for an interesting conference over the next three days. The topic's going to be interesting – covering social media, behaviour change and, one of my current interests, how you work with a group who have a fixed narrative – a conspiracy theory of Read more…
The other week I had one of those fun weeks where the situations and people are so different from one day to the next, I was at risk of getting whiplash. On the one hand, I was lucky enough to join Anne McMurray and a group of people running interesting Read more…
Part of my time this year is being spent as an adviser to two organisations that are merging. It makes an interesting example of a merger process. All relevant posts on the process are collected under the Merger tag. The merger is progressing. Since I last blogged, the organisation has Read more…
The standard response of many people is that they know what others need/want. It's an easy trap to fall into – it requires less effort on our part to go and find out (which can seem expensive and time-consuming), it allows us to continue in thinking that we know them Read more…
A slightly frustrating day yesterday turned out to have its upside. Having journeyed to meet with clients, it turns out their PA hadn’t put the appointment in their diaries. So one person was in Denmark, the other in France while I stood at the front gate, resigned to spending two Read more…
John Kay's column in the Financial Times today chimes with a quote that struck me recently: "Rules are good. They define the edges of things" It made me think, specifically, about how rules are used in different domains of Dave Snowden's Cynefin framework. In the Simple (Known) domain, rules dominate Read more…
I couldn’t help but enjoy this one. The perfect example of a managerial approach to social networks. (And I’ve heard some social computing evangelists say pretty much the same thing…) And what would be more appropriate than a glorious hierarchical top-down instruction to use bottom-up tools?
One of the listservs I tune into had a fascinating conversation recently. Someone was asking advice about how to get in touch with staff who don't seem to read all-staff emails. It's not an uncommon problem and one of the assumptions is that they should read all their emails. Or Read more…
The second part of the series I promised on using narrative and storytelling from the slide I showed the LGComms conference earlier this year. (Part 1 was Get the Story Straight). When I showed this slide at LGComms, I knew only too well that “Branding – the stories to attract Read more…