You have a culture if your organisation is over a few days old. It’s made of how you do things and is rooted in values. It’s also in flux. Every person you hire and fire, office you open and close, market you enter or exit shapes activity and know-how. I’ve previously written...
My first book called Between Making Money and World Peace is about finding your purpose and values.And while some of my thinking about how you do that and the role they play has evolved since I pulled it together. What remains true is most organisations sit somewhere between chasing profit...
During a recent lengthy morning commute, I listened to the Knowledge Project podcast, where host Shane Parrish interviewed Aaron Dignan. Aaron’s a coach and author of Brave New Work. There were a lot of good insights, and one in particular grabbed my attention.They were talking about how misusing compliance undermines...
When a brand’s store of value overflows, there’s usually an undercurrent of I care about what you care about going on between me and you. It shows up in both the promises made and agreed upon.Within those same promises is a contract called ‘what we owe each other’. In his...
Forbes Magazine describes the idea of staff engagement as “the emotional commitment the employee has to the organisation and its goals”.And organisations’ desire for that commitment often kicks off a slew of things designed to motivate people and measure how they’re doing.But those motivations and measures are distant from people’s...
The continuing effort to keep values in balance tempts many organisations to measure and manage them in people’s performance and behaviours. Judging whether they’re holding the value or not.But there is a different way to keep values on track, so they contribute to the brand. One that allows for their...
Turn in any direction these days, and you’ll trip over people talking about their purpose. This is not a bad thing; it’s essential to individual and group endeavours.Yet, when I look past the virtue signals of purpose-led this and purposeful that, I struggle to see how people put it to...
Sticking with values, I want to expand on an element of Aristotle’s golden mean from my last article. I call it productive tension.Look under the covers of successful organisations, and you will find tension at work. No, I’m not talking about “this place sucks” hostility.You can most commonly find my kind of...
Too many conversations about values start by asking are they right or wrong. But for most organisations “How do we use them?” is a more worthy and useful question.I’ll go further. It’s the only question that truly matters. And I’m not talking about laundry lists of behaviours for doing this...
On the bottom shelf of my bookcase, I’ve got a small library of books and a stack of papers that explore promises and commitments.The authors ramble at length about the moral foundations and legal consequences of making, keeping and breaking promises. Yet, beyond the examples they use, none provide tools...
