culture + org design

As I said, most companies and most interviews focus more on the question: can this person do what we need? But if you’re trying to recruit the best talent in the world, it needs to start with them. Who are they? What do they love doing? What are their ambitions? How does their past shape what they want for their future? What are they insecure... See more

I also love the point being made in the video above about how people can be a part of culture by just enjoying it, you don’t have to be a model or a ‘somebody’. It connects directly with a conversation I saw playing out on TikTok this week between Rian Phin and a few other folks, who ultimately stated they preferred fashion analysis from outsiders,... See more

The English word “company” comes from the French compaigne—the sharing of bread, the same root as “companion.” Interestingly, the oldest Swedish term for business, narings liv, means “nourishment for life,” and the oldest Chinese symbol for business translates as “life meaning.” Perhaps when we rediscover organizations as living systems, we will

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BCG’s research underscores a fundamental shift in the employer-employee dynamic. Today, many people are on the lookout for better job opportunities, and it is time for leaders to start treating their employees like customers. This means companies need to use all their customer-focused capabilities such as deep discovery, sophisticated needs... See more

Your success here will depend entirely on how successfully you can tell stories, and how successfully other people can repeat those stories, both to themselves and others.Your North Star here has to be: are other people retelling this story successfully?Port cities around the world are more similar to each other than they are to their inland... See more

Meanwhile, our corporations are full of bodies - our offices have become disembodied and mediated via Zoom screens but our teams are still embodied and grappling with new environments.

The body becomes a clearer extension of the organization now that we're playing in emergent territory - the home is now the office and companies are now in the... See more

Visa’s founding CEO Dee Hock had a realization. He saw clearly that it was “beyond the power of reason to design an organization” capable of coordinating a global network of financial transactions of the sort that had started to develop.7 Yet, he also knew that nature regularly achieves just that. Why, he wondered, couldn’t “a human organization

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Peter Drucker said that “making money for a company is like oxygen for a person; if you don’t have enough of it you’re out of the game.” In other words, profitability is a performance requirement for all businesses, but it is not a purpose. Extending Drucker’s metaphor, companies who take profit as their purpose are like people who think life is

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