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Topic: Company culture
Stories: how and why
A tweet last week from Dave Snowden alerted me to Anecdote’s Story-Spotting Test. The thing that bothered me about Anecdote’s definition of a story is what it left out. The markers they’ve identified cover the who, where, when and what. They don’t mention the how or the why. Hmmm…. Continue reading
I mulled this over. And began realising that Throughline's practice is deeply interested in the "how" and "why". Maybe it's because our bread-and-butter is finding and crafting stories on B2B topics where "how" and "why" are quite genuinely the most interesting questions to ...MORE >
Collaborating to create value: who is the client?
Now in our fourth year, we’re thinking a lot about how we collaborate to create value for our clients. One of things we’ve discovered is that: network-delivery models create hidden “clients” who can crowd out the needs of the actual, ultimate client. Here’s a story about hidden clients in a networked business situation:
Continue reading
Robert just told me about his work with Jane. Jane is internal communications manager for a company involved in a merger. Her annual budget trebled for the merger period. She had a choice: enlarge her circle of advisors or ask an incumbent agency ...MORE >
Singing from the same hymn sheet?
How does organisational culture actually work? Do value statements actually describe behaviour and day-to-day practices? Or is there a gap? A story about singing, and a song…. Continue reading
Here's comic Tim Minchin on the dilemma he faces because he can't walk the talk.
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In his book Unmanaging: Opening up the organisation to its own unspoken knowledge, McKinsey veteran Theodore Taptikilis tells an entertaining story that prefigures the organisational culture movement in the ...MORE >
Why do we need to track emergent culture change?
“Emergent” culture change is becoming a pressing issue at both corporate and national levels. It’s time to start tracking it, so the changes don’t catch you off guard. Continue reading
"Emergent" culture change - or how cultures quietly evolve - is an issue that has received relatively little attention. In part this is because the main bodies of measurements of culture are those of the values of national cultures begun by Hofstede and ...MORE >
If you think like hammer, does everything start to look like a nail?
Tool bound thinking is the topic for a group discussion about internal communications that I’ve been part of over at the Commscrum blog. Continue reading
Commscrum is a group blog founded to bring interdisciplinary thinking to business communications. Founders Dan Gray, Kevin Keohane, Mike Klein and Lindsay Uittenbogaard kindly invited me to join the second wave of posters - so here is my first post in collaboration with ...MORE >
Managing the future workplace? Start here.
We distil the essence of Wall Street Journal online editor Alan Murray’s advice to managers… Continue reading
Stay flexible. (Essential for agility in the face of uncertainty.)
Devour data. (Not just bits and bytes - keep an "ear to the ground" and actually get out into the field and talk to the ordinary folk using your products.
Be (somewhat) humble. (Recognise ...MORE >
Grabbing the imagination
To have impact in workplaces, stories must strike the right balance between the exemplary and the familiar. Continue reading
Good stories motivate staff is the key idea behind Rhymer Rigby’s piece in yesterday's FT.
Rigby quotes Allianz Insurance corporate events manager Stephen Flynn: “The [stories] that work the best are those that are unusual enough to grab the imagination but generic enough that you ...MORE >