Organizational Development - Change - Strategy
...three great posts and one article on organization development, change, and strategy. The howto's of solving problems by putting real relationships first.
Human Resources
Putting the Human Into Human Resources [reg req] is an article in Fast Company about Dave Ulrich.
His stint running a Mormon mission has sharpened Dave Ulrich's thinking about the interaction of individuals and organizations. Here's what he has learned working with both CEOs and fresh-faced young missionaries.
From: Issue 97 | August 2005 | Page 51 By: Lucas Conley
Create a shared goal.
Just as missionaries may not want to wake up at 6 a.m. to proselytize for the church, employees may not want what the company wants. "Maybe my goal is to increase shareholder value and yours is to get a new car," he says. The key is to share a common goal. Something that says, "If we share this in common, maybe shareholders will make money, maybe you'll be able to buy a nice car, maybe the customer will get a better product.
Nice to see Mr. Ulrich singing with the choir.
Lisa Haneberg from Management Craft has started a - Scrap Performance Appraisals series this week. Check it out.
Part 1 A friend of mine, who is a HR department head, challenged me to come up with the alternative to performance appraisal systems. She, like many of you, has heard me say time and again that they are a waste of time and most often counter productive. And boy are they costly!!!
Cha-ching goes the corporate cash register (the song "Money" stuck in my head).
The topic of performance appraisals is interwoven with the topics of motivation, incentives, competition, and rewards. So our conversation this week might venture into some or all of these areas.
After we stop appraisals, then, separately, we focus on building an environment that optimizes performance.
Doc on PR, Marketing, and Sales
Doc Searls, Changing the PR game covers Edelman and other pr stuff with a heap of cluetrain.
Doc, So the job for PR is to live up to its second name: Relations. PR needs to be the force in the industry that advocates real relations between companies and customers †across the whole enterprise, and not just through the sales/customer interface. Market conversations need to involve everybody with an interest in the whole market category, including non-sales and non-marketing employees within the company, and interested customers, journalists and other industry parties out in the marketplace.
PR needs to become an advocate, and an instrument, of truth and trust. This has always been an ideal of PR; but let's face it ... that's not usually what PR gets hired to do. If it was, PR wouldn't be a piñata.
Dave Pollard on Freakonomics and Complexity
Dave, So, say the authors [of Freakonomics], we must be wary of conventional wisdom, skeptical until and unless the data strongly supports what we are told or what we believe. Thanks to the Internet, they say, some of the 'information asymmetries' that lead to unsupportable conventional wisdom are disappearing. But what Malcolm Gladwell calls 'learned helplessness' is still with us -- our inability to go beneath the surface, challenge and debunk conventional wisdom or instinct leads us to dysfunctional beliefs and actions: That we're safer in an SUV than another vehicle, for example, or that we should spend more money and effort trying to prevent terrorism happening in our countries than we spend trying to prevent common bacterial and viral infections, for example.
or as Lisa says...
"Here's the thing. Excellence or luck can make any system, program, or process, look like it is working. Some people who smoke 2 packs a day live to be 100."
My question and answer is at the bottom of this page under comments.