This milestone post is a salute to passionate and experienced culture and performance change agents. You understand the power of culture in organizations and the challenge, frustration, restlessness, and exhilaration inevitably linked to intentional culture-related action. We’re living in the absolute best time in history to be involved in meaningful culture change. Culture is finally…

It’s time to turn the culture world upside down and explode many incorrect notions that are preventing meaningful culture change for organizations and society. We’ve reached a critical point where most leaders are aware culture is important, but they range from being confused to intentionally uninformed about what culture change is all about. This culture…

I spent 15 years learning and applying culture insights as a senior executive and consultant across multiple organizations before I started to proactively reach out to top culture pioneers and experts to learn about their culture facts and fundamentals. We can’t learn much about culture from the popular press and most social media is dominated…

Grâce cette publication, vous pourrez accélérer le changement de votre culture organisationnelle. Chaque leader comprendra ici les bénéfices des réflexions critiques sur la culture ainsi que la résolution de problèmes, le changement, l’engagement, la stratégie, le recrutement et le consulting avec Edgar Schein, Professeur Émérite au MIT Sloan School of Management et personnalité la plus…

Culture is a hot topic. It was the Merriam-Webster “word of the year” for 2014. Leaders and experts across the world are talking about how to develop an agile culture, implement a lean culture, overcome the culture clash in acquisitions, and many other areas of culture change. Unfortunately, the reality is that most of these…

Haven’t we talked about employee engagement enough? Nope! Because despite the amount of time, energy and effort that organizations around the globe are investing in helping engage people in work, things aren’t improving much. Weekly pizza socials, guest speakers and telecommuting options are certainly appealing. I like pizza as much as the next guy. And,…

I wrote about the four reasons culture-shaping efforts fail in my previous post (Organizational culture has reached a tipping point, yet many culture change initiatives fail for four key reasons). But what makes them succeed? What makes some culture-change efforts successful where others become simply another ‘flavor of the week’ training session that never translates…

Measles, a disease once thought to be completely eradicated, is making a comeback. The flu vaccine was only 23% effective this year as long-identified strains continue to mutate. Hospitals breed superbugs and must continuously adapt to stop the spread of potentially fatal infections. Just as healthy people can be felled overnight by a new disease…

Is your workplace inspiring, engaging, and productive or frustrating, dull, and stagnant? Or is it somewhere in between? Effective leaders pay attention to the quality of their work culture, every day. They know that culture drives everything that happens in their team or department or company, good or bad. They invest time and energy observing…

Imagine walking into your leadership team meeting wondering whether the same old politics was going to play out. Would the same people work their own private agendas, again? Would the same people be silent and watch it happen? Would everyone just be nice and kind and not honest, and let the meeting pass without ever…

Is there a difference between mission statements and manifestos? Yes and no. Their intentions may be the same but that’s where the similarity ends. In practice, the outcomes of mission statements and manifestos are miles apart. Though manifestos and missions are crafted to bring people together behind a cause, manifesto’s have a much better track…

Successful mergers and acquisitions must be based primarily on strategic, financial and other objective criteria, but leaders should not lose sight of understanding and heading off the potential clash of cultures that can lead to financial failure. Far too often, cultural and leadership style differences are not considered seriously enough or systematically addressed.

Every day in the news lately you read about the latest mergers: airlines, pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies, large retailers like Staples and Office Depot, all consolidating for so many business reasons. Some are successful and create flourishing companies that benefit stockholders and employee’s careers. But  here’s the really scary reality: It’s been well documented over…

Every company, department or team needs a leader. Leaders set the tone for the organization’s culture. It is a proven fact. Can you have a successful company without a CEO? Do football team captains play a major role in a winning season? Does a cruise ship need a captain to reach its destination safely? A…

Employee engagement can’t be an afterthought anymore. It has clear and measurable impacts on your company’s bottom-line. Companies spend obscene amounts of money trying to measure engagement and “move the needle,” without any real long term results. That’s simply because they’re doing it wrong.

Just as every person has a personality, every single organization on the planet already has a culture. But what people really mean when they say they want to embed culture at work is that they want to create a positive culture.  One that, combined with the people and the products or services that are sold,…

21st Century corporate governance is a busy job. Acting on behalf of shareholders, boards of directors are paying attention to an escalating list of risks and rewards from a firm’s undertakings. Like many activities within any organization, “the squeaky wheels get the grease.” Other than in desperate situations such as ‘turnarounds,’ culture seldom ranks as…