Dive into the archives.
- BP & the Federal Government: When Strategic Alliance Works
Tucked away on page 4 of today’s Financial Times is a story by Ed Crooks and Harvey Morris called “High level tensions behind the clean-up effort”. Its a most marvelous narrative both in its depiction of process and content in organizational cooperation.
The context is familiar: the American populace, desirous of continuing our oil addiction, has [...]
- Organizational Dysfunction, Outplacing Emotion and a Man Called “Lynch”
In the movie version of the low-budget tv series, “The A-Team”, there is a running gag about CIA agents who all identify themselves– whether in Vietnam, Desert Storm, Iraqi Freedom, or home in the good ole USA, as “Mr Lynch”. The Kafka-esque or perhaps, Beckettian (thinking of Godot…) nature of the joke resonated deeply with [...]
- Case Study: Uncertainty and the Questionable Productivity of Certainty
Certainty is a momentary phenomenon of rootedness in the passing of time. The certain is the unchangeable, the fact of the present as it recedes into history. Beyond the unchangeable, looking forward, is the highly probable. Given what we know in the present, what do we see coming next?
With slightly more uncertainty, we enter the [...]
- Working Knowledge Initiative: Entrepreneurship is Making Use of Reciprocity
A question from a client who’d worked in the non-profit sector throughout her professional life got me to thinking. She was adamant that entrepreneurship meant exploitation. And committed to community building, she was concerned that personal gain meant diminution of the common good.
On reflection, what she’d left out was reciprocity. The only way that community [...]
- Working Knowledge Initiative: The Stories We Tell Ourselves as Others Hear Them
Here is a simple exercise: take a room of mature, urban professionals– highly educated & highly skilled. Ask each to reflect on a personal vignette, mirroring their sense of accomplishment and pride. Then contrast what capabilities they think are reflected in their own stories with the capabilities that others actually hear in their stories: the [...]
- Case Study: A Working Knowledge Initiative Success
“ Its been quite a process with its share of ups and downs, but the business model is consolidated, our aims are clear, and what you’ve helped me to learn about my own strengths and competencies, I couldn’t have dreamed of eighteen months ago.”
— C, on his successful use of the “Working Knowledge Initiative”
C’s “Working [...]
- Working Knowledge Initiative. Exercise 2 for Reluctant Entrepreneurs.
Eight arguments against trying the Working Knowledge Initiative and one reason for.
1) The premises of WKI are unreliable, untested (by me), and might discount my view of reality. Its something new— I’d prefer the tried and true. There’s nothing really wrong, anyway. Things will get better. I’ll wait to find work.
2) If my view of [...]
- Learning From Cases: 1. Emotional Learning as Value
Recent consultations with clients have converged in an exciting empirical finding. Focusing upon significant emotional and vocational transitions at midlife, we have often inventoried both material assets and knowledge assets at different life stages.
With the financial markets bubbling up 50% above their recent lows, clients seemed curious about looking back over adulthood and quantifying “how [...]
- Curating the Accord Advisory Blog
Taking a page from our own blog, Accord set out this week to review what we’ve written for the last year. The idea was simple: in managing our daily affairs, the projects that are before us, and how these shape our identity over time, something gets lost.
It can be likened to baking cookies: you roll [...]
- Composing a Language
One of the results of studying different disciplines– clinical psychology, psychoanalysis, group relations, business administration, organizational development, and industrial-organizational psychology—is a parochial confusion of tongues.
What one discipline holds as the meaning of a word or concept is not its understanding within another, related discipline. For example, “personality” within the i-o world conjures the very useful [...]
