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Founder of the Chaordic Alliance talks about organizations.

From the experiences of dozens skilled at making change happen, we've compiled a handbook -- 10 Laws of Change that you can use to gauge your development as a change agent in an era of total change.

Microsoft's Chairman predicts only mangers who master the digital universe will gain competitive advantage

Excellent article discussing the top 5 pieces of the Organizational Context Pyramid: Purpose, Mission, Vision, Core Values, & Strategy

The problem isn't that loyalty is dead or that careers are history. The real problem, argues Stanford's Jeffrey Pfeffer, is that so many companies are toxic -- and that they get exactly what they deserve.

You can't build a great company without great people. The problem: How do you know the great people when you see them? Rules for smart hiring from Nucor Steel, Silicon Graphics, and Southwest Airlines.

This 23-page .pdf paper investigates how a firm can best be organized to facilitate innovation, specifically concentrating on the design of R&D resource allocation systems and the use of external technology sources. The study's key findings are that increased use of external sources of technology results in increased efficiency but decreased effectiveness and that no strong relationship was found between the use of internal markets (authors metaphor) as a resource allocation system and firm performance.

As IT becomes even more integral to success, companies are rethinking how the organization looks, functions, and interacts with the rest of the business.

Let's face it. Anyone reading this article thinks that information about how to reward highly-regarded employees applies to them. And we all have ideas about what these rewards should be (more money, bigger title, bigger office, etc.) But short of giving out stock options that will be worth $500 zillion in six months, how can managers provide meaningful incentives, and rewards, for star performers? Wharton management professor Anne Cummings makes some suggestions.

McKinsey & Co. surveyed 6,900 senior executives and young managers from 56 companies to figure out the secret to winning the battle for great people. Here is an excerpt from the report on the seven "talent imperatives" that are essential for winning the war for talent. The seven:
1. Instill a talent mindset at all levels of the organization -- beginning with senior management.
2. Create "extreme" employee value propositions ( EVPs ) that deliver on your people's dreams.
3. Build a high-performance culture that combines a strong performance ethic with an open and trusting environment.
4. Recruit great talent continuously.
5. Develop people to their full potential.
6. Make room for talent to grow.
7. Focus on retaining high performers.

Authors of a new study claim vitality, integrity, tolerance, appreciation and latitude are the main elements to measure a healthy workplace. According to the researchers, trust and caring are the two most important aspects of a job. The pair also discovered that managers are the source of most of the problems. They interfere too much, punish or reward workers for results out of their control, and micromanage. Also, find their checklist of questions for companies to measure their emotional health.

Article uses the concepts of the Myers Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) to discuss group dynamics and ways to foster better communication.

Seven practices characterize highly productive companies turning them into 'digital organizations.' IT is the catalyst, but organizational capital provides the context.

Now that employees in many dot-com companies have suddenly found their stock options to be substantially "out of the money," is it time to announce the death of stock options as an integral component of compensation packages? Not so fast, argue Wharton accounting professors Christopher Ittner, Richard Lambert and David Larcker in a new paper that studies whether the performance of new economy firms is related to the level of equity grants to employees.

When an idea is turned down -- it doesn't matter whether the innovation is in technology, marketing, or management -- most people offer one of two reasons: technology or money. Behind these two common explanations are the real reasons why ideas are killed: the four different types of uncertainty:
1. Technological uncertainty
2. Resource uncertainty
3. Market uncertainty
4. Organizational uncertainty

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Feeling bad for feeling good. Such is the strange internal conflict that is Schadenfreude, a German word, literally translated as "harm joy," that describes taking pleasure, however fleeting, in someone else's misfortune. More complex and layered than envy or shame, schadenfreude is as universal a human emotion as exists ... and yet it is a word with no simple equivalent in English. Largely ignored for years, schadenfreude has lately become something of a hot topic, and more and more scholars and researchers have begun to pull back its dark petals to investigate its motivational role in business, in partnerships, and, for that matter, in all human interaction.

In the corporate environment, "teamwork" is the buzzword of management. But, while management's heart may be in the right place, their methods often miss the mark. Here are a few secrets to team building.

"At the end of the day, we bet on people, not strategies." So how do we attract and retain the right people to bet on?

Organizations are continually faced with "communication" and management problems. Until the underlying tension between the hierarchical structure and empowerment trends is openly addressed, leadership development initiatives will continue to miss the mark.

EI, or emotional intelligence, is a fairly new management concept that involves self-awareness, self control, large amounts of empathy and the ability to motivate others. EI has rapidly become one of the essential managerial qualities, leading some to wonder if emotional intelligence is a skill that can be an acquired through training. Mike Bagshaw seems to think so and presents a framework for EI skills acquisition.

Management writers generally espouse the view that success is good, failure is bad and much time and effort is devoted to explaining how to achieve the former and avoid the latter. Not everyone agrees with this philosophy, though, and in embracing the 'F' word the author contends that failure and success are merely two sides of the same coin and that the one cannot exist without the other.

Mildly scientific in its original conception, the selection interview first came into vogue around 100 years ago and remains the primary tool for hiring new employees. Researchers continue to debate how well this time-worn process works to find the best candidate for the job, and indeed if it works at all. M. Ronald Buckley and colleagues examine a century's worth of theory and practice.

This article is much more substantive than the title suggests, offering an anthropological analysis of organization types and their implications, drawing a corrolary to boards of directors in the end which leads to the discussion on CEO performance.

Editor's Note: This article is referenced by another article that might be of interest. See that at:
http://www.mbadepot.com/links/links.php?ID=1763

A summary of key points found in the book 'Change Is the Rule
Practical Actions for Change: On Target, On Time, On Budget' by Winford E. "Dutch" Holland, Ph.D.

Unless we fully understand the theory or thinking that we held true when we created practices and procedures that we use presently, we will be forever condemned to create different versions of what we have always done.

This article identifies six renegade roles that fall evenly into two categories: (1) Reactive Renegades, and (2) Proactive Renegades. The Reactive Renegade roles include: The Detective, The Instigator, and The Reactor. The Proactive Renegade roles include: The Visionary, The Architect, and The Builder. In case after case experience has shown that while one individual could play more than one renegade role, the success stories resulted from the collaboration of multiple people encompassing at least all three roles within each category. In other words a reactionary change requires The Detective, The Messenger, and The Reactor. Proactive changes require The Visionary, The Designer, and The Builder.

Why do some management ideas take root and remain viable and others wither and die? This article offers four fundamental reasons:
- All organizations are, fundamentally, living social organisms;
- Organizational culture is more powerful than anything else;
- System-focused interventions work; component-centered interventions usually do not;
- Interventions clearly tied to business strategy work; interventions not clearly tied to business strategy do not.

Success lies in the alignment of culture, strategy, and leadership.

Peter Senge argues that it is no accident that most organizations are ‘poor learners'. The way organizations are designed and structured, the ways jobs are defined, and the way we have been taught to behave and think in organizations create fundamental learning disabilities. The disabilities persist in spite of the best efforts of intelligent and committed people. The learning that does take place occurs in spite of the undetected disabilities that pervade most organizations to some degree.
1. "I am my position"
2. "The enemy is out there"
3. "The illusion of taking charge"
4. "The fixation on events"
5. "The parable of the boiled frog"
6. "The delusion of learning from experience"
7. "The myth of the management team"

This article starts off with a dubious and unsupported rail against centralized organizations. Luckily, it soon changes gears and discusses high-performing organizations and the futility of searching for an ideal or perfect organizational structure (the structure must be appropriate for the organization's vision and values, goals and priorities, skill and experience levels, culture, team effectiveness, etc.) Some general trends that are emerging are discussed as well.

Charles Handy discusses the increasing segregation of the working world into large organizations and independent workers and the associated implications. Also discussed is America's optimistic spirit.

Editor's Note: See related article at:
http://www.mbadepot.com/redir.php?ID=1953&file=links