Two traps that hurt real team performance have to do with work assignments. Those who have mastered the team discipline know that mutual accountability for shared work and shared performance is a hallmark of real teams. Put differently, if a small group can achieve the overall performance objectives through a series of individual work assignments, then the […]

You’ve all heard it. You gather in some auditorium to hear the Chief Executive, or you open your morning email for the latest memo from the top and hear or read, “Remember: We’re all a team!” Nothing wrong with that. Leaders must encourage, shape and build a culture of shared purpose in order to have […]

When the truth is found to be lies And all the joy within you dies Don’t you want somebody to love Don’t you need somebody to love Wouldn’t you love somebody to love You better find somebody to love — The Jefferson Airplane

A few weeks back, the employees of Teen People (a spin off of Time Warner’s popular People magazine) told their 1.6 million young readers the February issue would feature two thirteen-year old girls hoping to become the next ‘cute girl’ singing celebrities. The girls’ mother has reared them to admire Adolf Hitler and, under her […]

In our world of markets, networks, organizations, friends and families, political candidates for high profile offices such as Senator, Governor and President must pay a lot of attention to branding. Retail politics — where the candidate him/herself kissed babies, spoke to town halls, knocked on doors — went out with Elvis. Yes, candidates still do […]

For several years, Harrisinteractive of the Harris polling company has done an annual survey of the ‘reputation quotient’ of what it calls the 60 ‘most visible’ companies. The survey asks respondents to evaluate companies against 20 attributes ranging from social responsibility to financial performance to product quality. Each of the twenty can earn a top score of […]

The Attorney General of Texas has sued Sony BMG for the aggressive use of ‘rootkits’ as an anti-piracy tool. The Electronic Frontier Foundation also has sued Sony in a separate matter.  Wikipediadescribes rootkits as software that “helps an intruder maintain access to a system without the user’s knowledge”. If that strikes a bad note, it’s because […]

Today, General Motors announced it would eliminate 30,000 manufacturing jobs through a series of plant closings. That’s 9% of the people who work at GM (325,000) and a much higher percentage of manufacturing jobs. This is a tragic development for thousands of families and communities. And, yes, we know that it is also a move aimed at […]

Wal-Mart has hired Richard Edelman’s firm to lead the giant retailer’s public relations response to the intensifying debate over Wal-Mart’s values and practices. This is a wonderful opportunity for Edelman and those who work in his firm to put into practice Edelman’s own values about the responsibilities of public relations professionals in our complex 21st […]

Figuring out the best approaches to difficult problems is hard work in any context. But, it is much harder in a market context than an organizational one. Take as an example Iraq. The problem solving effort does move forward in both contexts; that is, the political market for government direction and policy as well as […]

Teaching — at any level and in any context — is a human gift of profound importance. If that teaching is done in an ongoing organizational setting (e.g. a classroom), the teacher inevitably must accomodate him or herself to a shared assumption regarding authority. Yes, this shared assumption can be gossamer thin in some contexts; […]

Any widespread belief and practice of ‘the rule of law’ can be understood as a strong commitment to principle over personality. Consider, for example, a game such as Scrabble. The rule of law applied to Scrabble means that the players mutually accept a set of rules — a set of laws — for playing the […]

Peter Drucker, the preeminent management thinker of the 20th century, died this week. Let’s honor him, ourselves and our posterity by picking up on one of his central teachings; namely, that, while powerful and useful, hierarchy is incomplete. It is but one thread in the fabric of management and leadership — albeit the thread most […]

If I’m understanding this correctly, the publisher of the NY Times has said the Judith Miller affair is minor when contrasted with the Jayson Blair affair. Among other things, Blair plagiarized his way through the ranks and, at some point along the way, did so without sufficient oversight from management. These failings put in question all that […]

More than 100,000 people work at the IRS. People like Frank, Jeff, Laurie and Linda. In our new world of market, networks, organizations, friends and families, these four and thousands of their colleagues depend on one another every single day for matters of great importance to each of them: job security, benefits, affiliation, shared purpose. When […]

If you visit Dave Wilton’s wordorigins, you can explore the evolution of meaning for various words from A to Z. “Quiz”, for example, has gone from a noun describing an odd person to a verb about mocking or making fun to our contemporary verb of testing. This phenomenon — that the meaning of words do not […]

Chevron has invited a handful of experts as well as the general public to join a discussion about the planet’s energy future. We should applaud this effort. Wherever the effort sits on the spectrum of ‘toe in the water/public relations’ to ‘serious inquiry”, it does allow for discussion — perhaps most importantly among the employees and executives […]

In his book The Ethics of Memory, the contemporary philosopher Avishai Margalit differentiates between what he calls ‘thick we’s’ and ‘thin we’s’. Thin we’s have abstract, thin bonds — all Americans, all human beings, all “20-somethings”. Margalit is more interested in exploring ethical issues among people whose relationships are ‘thicker’; who have shared experiences and shared […]

You’re actively involved in some significant change — for example, a new strategy, a major reengineering project, a shift in brand approach and so forth. There are a variety of folks — from many perspectives — whose buy-in will matter to the success of whatever choice is made. Buy-in itself is a subtle concept. Those […]

Three weeks ago, executives from several major pharmaceutical companies sat down with President Bush to exchange ideas on how best to prepare for a possible bird flu pandemic. As noted previously, much of the pandemic possibility lies in a race between mutation of the bird flu and finding and distributing effective antidotes. Big Pharma told Bush […]