3605 Posts Found

The effective utilization of knowledge and learning requires both culture and technology. Explicit information and data can be easily codified, written down, and stored in a data base. For this type of business information we have the necessary skills and more than adequate tools. Yet, simple data is frequently not where competitive advantage is found. An organization’s real edge in the marketplace is often found … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Valdis Krebs | Source: LeaderValues | Subjects: Knowledge Management, Organizational Behavior

To be successful, corporate leaders must keep customer requirements, process improvement activities, and employees aligned with organizational goals, and monitor this alignment on a regular basis. Measurement software can make the challenge manageable.

Content: Article | Author: George H. Labovitz | Source: Business Performance Management | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

Understanding your personal communication style — and tailoring your messages to ensure that co-workers get the true meaning — can help you avoid serious management problems.

Content: Article | Author: Carol Orsag Madigan | Source: Business Finance Magazine | Subjects: Organizational Behavior, Personal Development

The gap between the need to innovate and the tools for doing so leaves us with a problem: How can we move beyond the practices of today to invent the best practices of tomorrow? And where will we keep getting new ideas for organizational processes to adapt to a continually changing world? If we are to understand successful organizational practices, we must be able to … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Sources: Center for Coordination Science, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

The goal of the MIT Process Handbook Project is to develop rich online libraries for sharing and managing many kinds of knowledge about business. For example, these libraries can help find interesting case examples, generate innovative ideas about new business possibilities, and develop new computer programs.

Starting in 1991, we have developed one such library. We call it the Process Handbook–an extensive online knowledge base including … [ Read more ]

Content: Online Resource | Source: Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

When Terrence E. Deal and Allan A. Kennedy collaborated on Corporate Cultures in 1982, they were examining a facet of organizational life that over time would evolve from unknown to generally misunderstood to widely accepted. In light of the attention that corporate culture has since received–and the continuous pressures exerted upon it by everything from the broadening dependence on outsourcing to the growing recognition of … [ Read more ]

Content: Book | Authors: Allan A. Kennedy, Terrence E. Deal | Subjects: Management, Organizational Behavior

In the early 1980s, Terry Deal and Allan Kennedy launched a new field of inquiry and practice with the publication of their landmark book, Corporate Cultures, in which they argued that distinct types of cultures evolve within companies, with a direct and measurable impact on strategy and performance. Despite the dramatic evolution of the business landscape over the last twenty years, the basic principles of … [ Read more ]

Content: Book | Authors: Allan A. Kennedy, Terrence E. Deal | Subject: Organizational Behavior

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When wealth is lost, nothing is lost. When health is lost, something is lost. When character is lost, everything is lost.

Content: Quotation | Source: Sanskrit poem | Subjects: Character, Ethics

the purpose of organization is to achieve the kind and degree of order and conformity necessary to do a particular job. The organization exists to restrict and channel the range of individual actions and behavior into a predictable and knowable routine. Without organization there would be chaos and decay. Organization exists in order to create that amount and kind of inflexibility that are necessary to … [ Read more ]

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

In the higher-status service occupations, such as in the church and the army, one customarily behaves ritualistically, not rationally. In the lower-status service occupations, one simply obeys. In neither is independent thinking presumed to be a requisite of holding a job. The most that can therefore be expected from service improvements is that, like Avis, a person will try harder. He will just exert more … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Harvard Business Review | Subject: Organizational Behavior

Those who extol the liberating virtues of corporate creativity over the somnambulistic vices of corporate conformity may actually be giving advice that in the end will reduce the creative animation of business. This is because they tend to confuse the getting of ideas with their implementation-that is, confuse creativity in the abstract with practical innovation; not understand the operating executive’s day-to-day problems; and underestimate the … [ Read more ]

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

Advocacy of a “permissive environment” for creativity in an organization is often a veiled attack on the idea of the organization itself. This quickly becomes clear when one recognizes this inescapable fact: One of the collateral purposes of an organization is to be inhospitable to a great and constant flow of ideas and creativity.

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

Breakthroughs in brain research explain how to make organizational transformation succeed.

Editor’s Note: very interesting concepts…a highly recommended read.

Content: Article | Authors: David Rock, Jeffrey Schwartz | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Change Management, Organizational Behavior

There’s only a fine line between entrepreneurship and insubordination.

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

Corporate budgeting systems favor established businesses because incremental dollars usually provide higher financial returns when invested in known markets rather than unknown ones. New businesses are therefore difficult to finance for long periods, and in times of austerity, they are the first to face funding cuts. In a similar spirit, companies design HR systems to develop executives whose operational skills match the needs of mature … [ Read more ]

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

Most of us have become masters of multitasking, adept at responding to e-mail messages during meetings and making time for multiple distractions when we’re actually trying to get work done. But is it possible to be productive when we’re constantly interrupted? Workplace expert Gloria Mark tackled this question, and offers some counterintuitive findings, including this one: Interruptions can actually be quite beneficial.

Content: Article | Author: Gloria Mark | Source: Gallup Management Journal | Subject: Organizational Behavior

Most daring new ideas are foolish or dangerous and appropriately rejected or ignored. So while it may be true that great geniuses are usually heretics, heretics are rarely great geniuses. If we could identify which heretics would turn out to be geniuses, life would be easier than it is. There is plenty of evidence that we cannot.

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

For trust to be anything truly meaningful, you have to trust somebody who isn’t trustworthy. Otherwise, it’s just a standard rational transaction. The relationships among leaders and those between leaders and their followers certainly involve elements of simple exchange and reciprocity, but humans are capable of, and often exhibit, more arbitrary sentiments of commitment to one another.

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

The business firm is one of the few contemporary institutions in which the arbitrary and gratuitous cruelty of the powerful in dealing with the weak is tolerated, even encouraged.

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