Employee rules (or: Employees rule?)

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:[…]

Geez, Roger. Just say, “We effed up” already.

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[…]

Facts Without Context

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.”[…]

Forget the Company Picnic — They’d Rather Have Good Work to Do

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[…]

Why Strategy Dies

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[…]