How can leaders inspire employees to help their colleagues? The leader of the design firm IDEO, Tim Brown, set out to create a help-friendly organization in order to spur greater creativity. Collaboration is key to effective organizations. But how can leaders encourage helping behaviors among employees? A recent Harvard Business Review article by Teresa Amabile,Read… Read more »
In the final season of 30 Rock, Liz Lemon finally finds something she can be excited about with her husband: spreadsheets. When her boss hands her an impossible schedule, she dives into the world of extreme organization and suddenly becomes very passionate about it. The show is a comedy and this plot is funny becauseRead… Read more »
There is a new “map” of the Federal Government, courtesy of the Administrative Conference of the U.S. It is an update of an earlier “map” created in 1980 by the Congressional Research Service. The National Geographic periodically publishes updated maps of the contours of the U.S. but there is no institution that takes on aRead… Read more »
With any organizational realignment or restructuring the challenge and real work is in the details of implementation. There are risks, challenges and issues to identify, address and manage. Realignment can be as small as rearranging a few positions and responsibilities or a major re-positioning of large divisions, along with changes to their operating units, processesRead… Read more »
Keeping the lines of communication and collaboration open between these nations and their militaries is a struggle under the best of conditions. However, the ongoing economic situation is impacting each and every member nation to some degree and at some level. This means that budgets need to be cut, every cent needs to be accountedRead… Read more »
With many organizations wanting to be lean and have a flat organization reporting structure, managers may become overwhelmed by the number of employees reporting directly to them; and have difficulty effectively managing their direct reports and the operations for which they are responsible. Before you start to change your organization structure (or give up onRead… Read more »
The Atlantic published a great piece last week by Eric Garland entitled Peak Intel: How So-Called Strategic Intelligence Actually Makes Us Dumber, here’s a particularly powerful excerpt: “Hierarchical organizations have a very different logic than smaller firms. In less consolidated industries, success and failure are largely the result of the decisions you make, so intelligenceRead… Read more »
Despite fear that terrorists could the information to start epidemics, the World Health Organization (WHO) recently announced they would release the “full details” of experiments done last year by research teams, at Erasmus Medical Centre, Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, and at the University of Wisconsin-Madison on the virus known as H5N1, that made the deadlyRead… Read more »
Organizations are collections of people—individuals who have an inner work lives. The inner work life is a complex set of processes affecting how individuals understand themselves and interact with others. While most of the inner work life is hidden, a great deal is revealed through patterns in behavior, which ultimately affect work, performance, and theRead… Read more »
Most of the time, when I engage with or speak to federal public servants, they are among the most eager to find ways to work around the bureaucracy in which they find themselves. They want to make stuff happen, and ideally, to make it happen right and more quickly. This is particularly true of youngerRead… Read more »