3590 Posts Found

Why has Dell been consistently successful over the past decade? Aside from the operational discipline and talented people, Dell founder Michael Dell and CEO Kevin Rollins cites their success on “years and years of DNA development that is not replicable outside the company.” In a word: culture. Culture can be the glue that holds an organization together and leverages it well into the future. Find … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Paul Meehan, Paul Rogers, Scott Tanner | Source: Bain & Company | Subjects: Best Practices, Organizational Behavior

Collaboration is the hottest buzzword in business today. Too bad it doesn’t work.

Content: Article | Author: David H. Freedman | Source: Inc. Magazine | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

…the moral, however relevant, is not what’s most notable to a student of storytelling. What’s remarkable is that when listeners hear the start of such a story – whether fable, personal remembrance, or corporate myth – they implicitly agree to a certain set of rules as an audience. Rather than judge the veracity of each fact presented, as they would in a traditional analytical presentation, … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Communication, Persuasion

Organizations of all kinds are cluttered with control mechanisms that paralyze employees and leaders alike. Where have all these policies, procedures, protocols, laws, and regulations come from? And why is it so difficult to avoid creating more, even as we suffer from the terrible confines of overcontrol? These mechanisms seem to derive from our fear — our fear of one another, of a harsh competitive … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Leader to Leader | Subjects: Fear / Doubt, Organizational Behavior

People organize together to accomplish more, not less. Behind every organizing impulse is a realization that by joining with others we can accomplish something important that we could not accomplish alone. And this impulse to organize so as to accomplish more is not only true of humans, but is found in all living systems. Every living thing seeks to create a world in which it … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Leader to Leader | Subject: Organizational Behavior

Why do so many successful entrepreneurs feel like fakes?

Content: Article | Author: Leigh Buchanan | Source: Inc. Magazine | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Organizational Behavior

A lot, says the author of Vital Friends: The People You Can’t Afford to Live Without. In fact, he says they’re so valuable that managers should actually be fostering close relationships in the office.

Content: Article | Author: Tom Rath | Source: Gallup Management Journal | Subject: Organizational Behavior

If you are less successful at work than you could be, you might be your own worst enemy for being too individualistic.

Content: Article | Author: Mitch McCrimmon, Ph.D. | Source: CEO Refresher | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

Complaining about my father’s vagaries would be like complaining that Yogi Berra doesn’t make sense when he talks. When someone’s flaws are also their defining and most seductive characteristics, you just have to accept the consequences.

Content: Quotation | Source: Inc. Magazine | Subjects: Human Resources, Personality / Behavior

“One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit,” Harry G. Frankfurt writes, in what must surely be the most eyebrow-raising opener in modern philosophical prose. “Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted.” This compact little book, as pungent as the phenomenon it explores, attempts to articulate … [ Read more ]

Content: Book | Author: Harry G. Frankfurt | Subjects: Miscellaneous, Organizational Behavior

[stories] fulfill a profound human need to grasp the patterns of living-not merely as an intellectual exercise, but within a very personal, emotional experience.

Content: Quotation | Source: Harvard Business School (HBS) Working Knowledge | Subjects: Communication, Management

There are two ways to persuade people. The first is by using conventional rhetoric, which is what most executives are trained in. It’s an intellectual process, and in the business world it usually consists of a PowerPoint slide presentation in which you say, “Here is our company’s biggest challenge, and here is what we need to do to prosper.” And you build your case by … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subjects: Communication, Organizational Behavior, Storytelling

Nothing is more frustrating than trying to get people to alter the way they do things. New research reveals why it’s so hard and suggests strategies to make it easier.

Content: Article | Author: Christopher Koch | Source: CIO Magazine | Subjects: Change Management, Organizational Behavior

In purely top-down structures, key information and insights from below are often missed. Decisions take too long and are not as targeted and effective as they would be if information from front-line employees were taken into account.

But what governance system to use? Not a model based on consensus or democracy. Consensus often devolves into the least-common-denominator approach. People give in to what the largest egos … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Brian Robertson | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

Big corporations must make sweeping organizational changes to get the best from their professionals.

Content: Article | Authors: Claudia Joyce, Lowell Bryan | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

We keep hearing that OD is dead. We hear that change management has replaced it. But change management is about driving change from the top, and reasserting hierarchy. It’s a way of talking about change but not changing anything.

Content: Quotation | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Change Management, Organizational Behavior

Teams are a way of making groups more comfortable for men by adapting the language of sports. Groups were about collaboration and learning, but teams can be focused just on winning. This appeals to organizations focused on the bottom line, but the ability of people to make breakthroughs is compromised.

Content: Quotation | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Teamwork

Individual coaching is the death of the group. Working with a single person, you can’t see how his behavior affects the whole system. And giving people evaluations rather than creating situations where they can learn to evaluate themselves doesn’t really raise their awareness. Also, the coach is usually the instrument of hierarchy, a way of asserting behavioral control from the top.

Content: Quotation | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Coaching, Organizational Behavior

People respond almost too well to monetary incentives. That is, ‘firms get what they pay for’, but since these schemes cannot be targeted well, what firms get is often not what they want.

If an organization is going to function well, it should not rely solely on monetary compensation schemes. The ability of organizations to place workers into jobs with which they identify and the … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: George Akerlof, Rachel Kranton | Source: Rotman Magazine | Subjects: Motivation, Organizational Behavior

In a model of utility, a person’s identity describes gains and losses in utility from behaviour that conforms or departs from the norms for particular social categories in particular situations.This concept of utility is a break with traditional economics, where utility functions are not situation-dependent, but fixed.

Identity is useful to economists because it suggests a natural way in which behaviour can vary within a population. … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: George Akerlof, Rachel Kranton | Source: Rotman Magazine | Subjects: Economics, Organizational Behavior