Beverly told her boss she was pregnant and was fired. She wasn’t the only one, and her employer Amazon is currently navigating a slew of lawsuits from people who met the same fate. A story of the retail giant treating an employee badly is hardly an isolated incident. In order to keep...
At a recent talk at the CPHR conference in Vancouver Canada, Duncan Wardle (past life head of innovation and creativity for Disney) ran an experiment where he asked the audience to respond to a set of ideas he mentioned with ‘no because’. He then asked people to use the flip...
If you want to shift a culture, then fire everyone and hire different people who care about what you care about. Of course, that’s not practical at any scale. Author and former foreign policy adviser to President Obama, Ben Rhodes, articulates it more eloquently in his book The World As It...
“Culture fit is a recipe for groupthink—it weeds out diversity of thought.” Psychologist, Wharton Professor and author Adam Grant posted the above quote on LinkedIn last week. I think it depends on your workplace culture. What is culture? My definition: what we value and how we are together. Grant’s post continued: “Hire, reward, and promote cultural...
While culture may or may not eat strategy for breakfast, depending on which side of the quote attributed to Peter Drucker you fall, it’s futile to resist the influence it has on groups of people. Culture also acts as connective tissue for the brand result. Starting with the intention captured by...
The biggest struggle organisation’s face around purpose is how to translate the grand intention into a sense of purpose in people’s everyday work. Finding what you care about has the potential to bring unity and energy to your endeavour. But without connecting purpose with every person’s every day, it may as...
I heard this at a recent event: “I got feedback after my last presentation … so I am going to spend more time on slide 3.” My issues with the evils of PowerPoint notwithstanding, the presenter should probably have ignored that advice. Slide 3 was probably fascinating for someone with a deep interest in...
Whether you make stuff or sell services; whether you’re in a B2B or B2C business, online or bricks-and-mortar, non-profit, social business or you work for yourself; consistency is the secret ingredient when it comes to achieving a successful brand result. Consistency isn’t sexy. It won’t make it onto any “fun things...
How often do you stop and say a simple “thanks for all your work” to the people around you? If you’re like most of us, the answer is not very often. Caught up in the daily grind, it can be hard enough to remember to go to the bathroom let...
Identity is a foundation of a brand, and so the identities of the people who work at the organisation and who make the promises and deliver the experience have a significant role to play in the result. And organisations are finally waking up to that relationship. Enter a whole slew of...