3590 Posts Found

Motivational speeches are about making people feel good about themselves and enthusiastic about where they can go. But in my experience, it doesn’t work to paint a rosy picture and say “Doesn’t it look great over there?” and expect everyone to drop what they’re doing and go in that direction. What I do is, instead of trying to make people feel good about where they … [ Read more ]

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

Russell Hochschild shows that for many professionals, “home” and “work” have reversed roles. Home is the source of stress and guilt, while work has become the “haven in a heartless world”–the place where successful professionals get strokes, admiration, and respect.

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

This clever and entertaining essay from Paul Graham discusses how outsiders, free from convention and expectations, often generate the most revolutionary of ideas.

Editor’s Note: I really enjoyed reading this and highly recommend it…

Content: Article | Author: Paul Graham | Source: ChangeThis | Subjects: Innovation, Organizational Behavior

A firm can adopt one of two mind-sets: It can apply an operational mind-set, approaching work as a routinized endeavor amenable to a standardized set of procedures and supported by detailed budgets and schedules. Alternatively, an organization can adopt an experimental mind-set-approaching work much like a research and development effort in which testing, learning, and adaptation take precedence over standardization. In such an environment, much … [ Read more ]

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

Team members work in increasingly diverse environments. They include age, gender, race, language, and nationality. Beyond these differences, there are also deeper cultural differences that influence the way conflict is approached. One reason that teams fail to meet performance expectations is their paralysis through unresolved conflict. The paper discusses the impact of culture on the prevention and resolution of conflict in teams and suggests seven … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: John Ford | Source: Mediate.com | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

In work days filled up by highly demanding, multitasked schedules, meetings often feel like a drain on valuable time, yet they keep multiplying. It surely makes sense to manage meeting so that each one pays back more than it costs. How to do ensure that this happens?

One of the most thorough and promising answers to that question has been provided by Patrick Lencioni in his … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Source: ManyWorlds | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

Is competition within your company healthy? It can be. Here’s how to highlight its benefits and minimize its risks.

Content: Article | Author: John Baldoni | Source: CIO Magazine | Subject: Organizational Behavior

The goal of a recent Air Force research project was to study teams in realistic time-sensitive situations to understand what kinds of tasks people do in these collaborative environments, why those tasks are so challenging, how they are currently done, and ways to better support team performance. This paper describes a framework, ITSE, developed as part of this research effort, intended to guide observation and … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Lindsley Boiney | Source: MITRE | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

This fieldguide is for all change champions who are learning about, seeking to, or who are in the midst of leading social or organizational change…The purpose of this fieldguide is to provide you with all of the necessary elements to implement a best practice change or leadership development initiative within your organization or social system. Contributors in this book are widely recognized as among the … [ Read more ]

Content: Book | Authors: David Ulrich, Jim Bolt, Louis Carter, Marshall Goldsmith, Warner Burke | Subjects: Change Management, Organizational Behavior

As the traditional advantages of scale and scope begin to lose their potency, the familiar concept of internal collaboration represents a powerful new source of competitive advantage for multinational companies.

Content: Article | Authors: Morten T. Hansen, Nitin Nohria | Source: Sloan Management Review (MIT) | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

Since bullshit need not be false, it differs from lies in its misrepresentational intent. The bullshitter may not deceive us, or even intend to do so, either about the facts or about what he takes the facts to be. What he does necessarily attempt to deceive us about is his enterprise. His only indispensably distinctive characteristic is that in a certain way he misrepresents what … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Ivey Business Journal | Subjects: Communication, Personality / Behavior

In this important book, successful organizations-including well-known companies such as Agilent Technologies, Corning, GE Capital, Hewlett Packard, Honeywell Aerospace, Lockheed Martin, MIT, Motorola, and Praxair-share their most effective approaches, tools, and specific methods for leadership development and organizational change. These exemplary organizations serve as models for leadership development and organizational change because they

* Commit to organizational objectives and culture
* … [ Read more ]

Content: Book | Authors: David Ulrich, Louis Carter, Marshall Goldsmith | Subjects: Leadership, Organizational Behavior

Power is based on the ability of one party to influence those things (the “stakes”) that matter to other parties to a degree that causes those other parties to eventually do something they would not have done without the first part’s actual or implied intervention. Despite popular belief, power is not particularly related to an imbalance of information available to the parties. Instead, the asymmetry … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Boston Consulting Group (BCG) | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Power / Authority

Research confirms that a person’s network is crucial to his or her ability to get work done successfully. But many people don’t understand that networks require conscious attention and investment of time to be effective, and others make the mistake of thinking that the only thing that matters is size. This research report demonstrates that the best networks are strong on three dimensions: structural, relational … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: David A. Light, Rob Cross, Robert J. Thomas | Source: Accenture | Subjects: Career, Organizational Behavior

If you had to identify, in one word, the reason that the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be meetings.

Content: Quotation | Source: Foresight | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Productivity / Work Tips

It is astounding how many “dumb” questions, well timed, might have prevented poor decisions.

Content: Quotation | Source: Chief Executive | Subject: Decision Making

In Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises,” a character is asked, “How did you go bankrupt?” He answers, “Gradually, then suddenly.”

That summarizes my ephiphany after 13 years running think tanks for chief executives and more than 10,000 hours of one-to-one conversations with industry leaders worldwide: Careers and companies succeed or fail, gradually then suddenly, one conversation at a time.

Content: Article | Author: Susan Scott | Source: seattlepi.com | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

Not far into the future, we will see as well as manage organizations very differently. Today, we rely on two-dimensional, static (and notoriously outdated) organization charts to depict what a company is or does. Soon, however, we will be able to represent organizations the way they really are: active, in motion, growing, shrinking, reacting to stimuli, flowing in the direction of opportunities and pulsating with … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Authors: Robert J. Thomas, Sarah R. Maloney | Source: Accenture | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

Too often the business world can identify a successful approach only when it sees it. The random odds of success or failure are as significant as their strategies. It’s not unusual for a company to hire bright 29-year-old McKinsey consultants and ignore the knowledge and expertise of its own 29-year-old employees.

Content: Quotation | Source: Workforce Management | Subjects: Knowledge, Organizational Behavior

Decision making is an inherently social exercise. Here, Michael Mauboussin details three shocking psychological studies that reveal just how another’s action or opinion can profoundly change your own.

Content: Article | Author: Michael J. Mauboussin | Source: ChangeThis | Subject: Organizational Behavior