Organizational Development

Today’s offices don’t encourage us to mingle - but that’s what creativity and productivity demand.

Few companies measure whether the design of their workspaces helps or hurts performance, but they should. The authors have collected data that capture individuals’ interactions, communications, and location information. They’ve learned that face-to-face interactions are by far the most important activity in an office; creating chance encounters between knowledge workers, both inside and outside the organization, improves performance.

The key elements that need to be prioritized to generate a culture that boosts real innovation.

How can we create an innovation team that can deliver value and that knows how to work in the different business lifecycle stages? Sara Pedraz highlights three requirements for creating innovative teams that accelerate an organization to achieve its goals. She notes that Innovative teams are balanced teams that explore crazy moonshot ideas while continuously reflecting upon them. Some of their protocols entail collaboration and coming up with solutions to produce satisfactory results. Let's read to find out more.

Hollie Delaney is taking lessons from her time at the online shoe retailer to her new CHRO gig at a national remodeling company.

Hollie Delaney is a successful HR that developed into a CHRO and then Chief of the people at Zappos. She learned a lot in terms of culture in her 14 years tenure in the company that she took and applies in her future endeavors. While at Zappos, she fueled the firm's cultural success by gearing up the company to create an environment where people could be themselves and bring their whole selves to work. Delaney now reiterates the lessons she acquired at Zappos and how she intends to incorporate them as the new Chief of People at Power Home Remodeling.

What the CEO of Airbnb thinks about culture, and why it is so important to nurture the shared passion of your employees.

How to master the process that’s transforming management

The authors identify six crucial elements for the success of agile transformation efforts: 1) Understanding how agile really works; 2) Knowing when it is appropriate; 3) Starting small and letting passionate evangelists spread the word; 4) Enabling teams that have mastered the process to customize their practices; 5) Incorporate agile at the top; and 6) Remove corporate agile barriers. The article expands on each item, providing a practical guide for agile implementations.

A guide through the proven steps that leaders around the globe have applied to change their culture.

The culture practiced in an organization determines the quality of value it delivers to its customers. Sometimes, changing the organizational culture improves the quality of its output overall, but it requires effort and focus. The article guides us through several fundamental steps of "how to change your organizational culture." We learn that switching to a new culture is a journey and leaders should be first in line.

Refining the feedback culture at an organizational level by comparing the daily practices of GitHub and Facebook.

A look at how GitHub and Facebook create and improve a feedback culture, beyond the traditional performance reviews. Ryan Nystrom discusses the fine details of handling feedback culture both on an organizational and personal level. By comparing the two cultures, he identifies the essential elements of a big company's feedback culture, its benefits, and how to keep the feedback useful.

Introducing a tool to help you paint an honest picture of your firm’s learning culture and of the leaders who set its tone.

Harvard Business Professors introduce a survey instrument tool that enables a granular examination of the three pillars of a learning culture, scores each of them, and provides a framework for detailed, comparative analysis. With the results, you can make comparisons within and among your institution’s functional areas, between your organization and others, and against benchmarks that the authors have derived from their surveys of hundreds of executives in many industries.

Describing the passion to explore and learn, and how companies can instil this mindset among their employees.

Companies today are creating lifelong learning programs for their employees to stay ahead of the competition. Some companies instill fear of losing work in their employees as one way of making them learn. The author suspected that this is not the most convenient method, but with the help of his colleagues, they discovered passion is the most powerful motivator for learning. Employees who have a similar passion as explorers, who are motivated to deal with their challenges and learn from them learn much faster than those motivated by fear.

Findings from running workshops over 10 years with 220 teams.

Knowledge Management is often met with resistance, and one of the early challenges is to convince managers that it results in real, tangible, measurable value for the business. The authors ran a KM workshop for over 10 years capturing statistics and share proof that KM works. Results show continuous innovation,
design evolution and performance improvement in every operational team - often reaching three to four-fold increase in a single workshop.

Learn what knowledge management (KM) is, what benefits it offers and what processes it involves.

Knowledge management is the discipline of capturing, storing, using, and sharing knowledge. It enables an organization to increase the value of its intellectual capital by leveraging its knowledge assets to achieve its goals. In this article Ryan Brooks shares a real-life KM project at a global enterprise, so you can understand why it is challenging and its key components, benefits and processes - so that you can maximize yours.

Fore score and twenty years ago, I had a change inflicted on me. And I didn't like it. Here's 6 ideas the 'change people' could have used to avoid my resistance.

Jason Little, an image and ringtone developer in the early 2000s describes how he resisted an organizational change inflicted by the QA manager while working as the production lead, which had intended to test every piece of ringtone and image to be produced. According to him, this was unbelievably insane as the numbers were vast and would consume a lot of time to get it done. Instead, he decided to pass stuff to production without the consent of the QA manager and they later came to a consensus that it was challenging to test every piece to be launched into production. Jason then suggest six ideas that the organization could have followed to mitigate employee change resistance.

Developing business agility leaders through a course that provides the theory and application of a business agility meta-framework.

Business agility has a greater advantage on companies. Companies that are advanced in their adoption of business agility report 60% higher revenue than the rest of the organizations surveyed. There are four elements of value purpose that benefit organizations they include, better, value, safer, and happier (BVSSH).

The meta-framework of BVSSH is seen in the subtitle of the book, Antipatterns, and patterns of business agility. The Washu students found this approach compelling as they were able to quickly identify patterns and antipatterns in their own organizations.

Thus, in order to identify and apply the BVSSH technique students need to interact with business agility in the wild. The author states that the meta-framework business agility theory as applied at Washu could serve as a course to develop business agility leaders.