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.
The pilots for Children of the World have been fantastic – collecting over 7,000 stories around the world. Working on them with Cognitive Edge was fascinating, challenging and fun – the ideal project! While we gear up for the next iteration and roll-out, I’m conscious that I don’t think I Read more…
You know, when your behaviour does not mesh with your values and attitudes, typically what happens is your attitudes and values change to fit the behaviour rather than the other way around. … If a company (Enron springs to mind, but it’s too black-and-white a choice) or department is focused on bringing in revenue and profit but are not the product development group, when they are exhorted by company values to be “Innovative” they have few options to exercise that value.
Two great sessions last week at the QEII Conference Centre with Dave Snowden of Cognitive Edge. The shift from theory to practical application of new management techniques based on principles of complexity, cognitive neuroscience, anthropology and others has been remarkably swift in recent years – and even for those who’ve Read more…
The opening gambit of more than one past client project has been “help us get our story straight”. Sometimes it’s just that – the general story – sometimes it’s something specific: “help us get our customer story straight”, “our story on leadership”. It’s an interesting starting point, but demands a Read more…
I mentioned this on Wednesday. Details are finalised: Practical approaches to intractable problems Prof Dave Snowden, Chief Scientific Officer, Cognitive Edge Thursday 4th November, 9.30-12.30; 1.30-4.30, QEII Conference Centre In recent years, techniques and tools are making it possible to exploit complexity and anthropological approaches to solving intractable problems – Read more…
The UK is having a bonfire today, well ahead of the usual Guy Fawkes Night celebrations. The Bonfire of the Quangos will be abolishing somewhere in the region of 180 QUasi-Autonomous Non-Governmental Organisations today in a bid to cut costs and reduce the confusion around these organisations. The arguments for Read more…
I’m spending time this afternoon at the launch of the UK office of the International Initiative for Impact Evaluation (3ie). While it’s a subject I’m keenly interested in, it’s not one in which I’ve got depth of understanding. I struggle sometimes to understand some of the conversations, but many of 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. I set the scene for the Merger last month in this Read more…
I’m amazed to still see how many people still put any faith into the Myers-Briggs personality tests in business. I remember doing it in 1994, not as part of my work thankfully – IBM weren’t that daft, but as a seminar I’d gone along to. Even then I’d struggled with Read more…
Still busy writing. But in the meantime, Cognitive Edge has published a paper on More Than Numbers – Revitalising Employee Engagement. Very good reading. You can download it here – an easy and important read!