Leading in a “VUCA” world: Finding Clarity through Story It’s a Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous (VUCA) world out there. Dr. Bob Johansen says we might as well get used to it. Johansen is the former president and CEO of the Institute for the Future, and the author of two terrific books on forecasting (Get There Early)[…]
Is there room in business for ideas like beauty, love and truth? (Or, more specifically, is there room for them in your business?) If he’s not on your RSS feed already, you should make space for Gary Hamel over at wsj.com. He’s always worth reading, but I find myself coming back repeatedly to a post from January: “The Hole[…]
My favorite tweeter these days is Umair Haque, an economist of all things, who also writes a blog over at Harvard Business Review. Haque is in the middle of a year-long exploration of the evolution of capitalism. A sampling of recent tweets provides a small glimpse into the broader thinking under development at Haque’s company, Havas Media Lab:[…]
Yesterday, 400 people who thought they had tickets to Super Bowl XLV showed up at Cowboys Stadium in Dallas only to be turned away. The fire marshal apparently deemed a whole section of temporary seating unsafe. Since then, the NFL has been conducting a master class in how not to handle communications in a crisis. Let’s start[…]
My youngest is home with a fever today, and so I am home, too. In a delightful “you got your peanut butter on my chocolate” moment, I was just now sitting at the dining room table reading the latest from Seth Godin while my daughter is in the other room watching “Ratatouille.” What a great[…]
A couple of weeks ago, my colleague Saunya Peterson was at Ignite Minneapolis giving a presentation on context. Her basic premise: story often gets lost when you present facts without context. Saunya’s example: “Young girl is mysteriously transported to a strange land where she kills the first woman she meets, then teams up with three strangers to kill again.”[…]
The Power of Organizational Narratives Here’s how the story goes. AT&T’s network couldn’t handle the data demands of the iPhone revolution. Apple was sour, and AT&T was disconnected. Discussions were going nowhere. Someone at AT&T had an idea. He suggested to an Apple executive that it might help if, uh… well, maybe Steve Jobs could[…]
This is the first in a series of posts arguing that the role of corporate communications is bigger than even communicators imagine. We’ll explore, together, what it might look like for us to step into that role. First, some facts that are not in dispute: Engaged employees—those investing discretionary effort on the job—create tangible ROI[…]
Some dreary news this week from Gallup, as reported recently in the Sunday New York Times. Americans have never felt worse about work: People of all ages, and across income levels, are unhappy with their supervisors, apathetic about their organizations and detached from what they do. No wonder we’re in a recession. You don’t suppose all that apathy[…]
I get to New York maybe two or three times a year on business. It used to be something I looked forward to, but now I tend to think more about the expense, the noise, and the sore feet than the wonders of the world’s greatest city. And then last week I took my daughter[…]
“You are so in for it. You have no idea.” I hear this a lot these days. Upon learning I’ve got a couple of daughters about to become teens, people I barely know become strangely comfortable projecting their own experiences onto my children. There must be some comfort in universalizing a private hell. I’ve always thought that[…]
Spend enough time in business and you will likely collect a shelf-ful of dusty binders packed with expensive strategic thinking. What do you actually remember from any of them? That has nothing to do with whether the strategy was good or bad. Strategy in a binder is worthless; effective strategy lives in the beliefs and[…]
Chris Guillebeau’s “Art of Non-Conformity” is one of the few blogs I rarely miss, partly because I sort of want to be Chris. Well, not really — but I do want to be a travel hacker someday, and Chris seems to have that down. But to my point: Chris has a great post today on happiness — or,[…]