Put culture on the agenda and make it stick
Read moreWhenever I make a public speech or work with a company on matters pertaining to building and sustaining a group culture, people inevitably ask for my views on what makes this type of initiative succeed or fail. While I have no magic formulas or foolproof answers, I can offer some suggestions based on my past experience. One of the first things I
Igniting the corporate campfire
Read moreLast time, I outlined my concept of a culture or a community as a collection of individuals who share their rituals and stories of collective identity. In extraordinary cultures, participants tell these types of tales over and over. Anecdotes that encapsulate who we are, what we stand for, and why we do things the way we do become part of the group’s tribal lore.
Why culture should be top of mind
Read moreWhenever I prepare a speech on a topic related to corporate culture, I pause to wonder why we do not give it the respect and attention it deserves. After all, if one of the world’s premier football managers calls team spirit a flower that must be cared for daily, and if legendary business thinker Peter Drucker tells us that culture will almost
Corporate culture is like a flower or a garden
Read moreLast week, I found myself back in Grenoble to speak at an offsite meeting of Soitec, a world leader in the field of generating and manufacturing revolutionary semiconductor materials, mostly for the electronics and energy industries. The topic of my speech was how organizations, and managers at all levels, can build, transform, and maintain strong group cultures. As I began preparing
How multitasking and smart phones change human interaction
Read moreI’ve had something of a busy travel schedule for the past 15 days, flying to the US for a series of board meetings, then working intensively with a new start-up client in New York during the last week of September. This week, I am back in Europe, preparing two corporate speeches, including one that takes me back to my former
Finding idleness in the swimming pool
Read moreIn the last post, I commented that the lifestyle of Pico Iyer—a travel writer who lives unplugged from nearly all Internet and telecommunication technology for months on end in his apartment in Kyoto, Japan—is fascinating, but probably not practical for the rest of us. Then, I wrote something about my own approach to putting moments of stillness and reflection into