Reading Time: 4 minutesThe context for cultures is changing. In four vital ways.
Tag: Culture
Strategy: 11 ways to purposefully achieve growth
Reading Time: 2 minutesYou can’t build a sustainably purposeful culture it seems to me without having a deliberately purposeful strategy. Part of the problem of course is that, traditionally, strategy and purpose have lived in different parts of the organisation. My suggestion is that they shouldn’t, and that instead of simply allocating purpose to culture and strategy to […]
How do you write a great purpose?
Reading Time: 3 minutesA sizzling purpose sets out how a company intends to change the world for the better. Its role is to unite customers and culture alike in the pursuit of that intention. It’s a statement of belief, of hope, of pursuit. It’s born of a wish to see the world put to rights. Having fielded a […]
How do you prevent your corporate culture from stalling?
Reading Time: 5 minutesThere is plenty of discussion, quite rightly, about the fact that people are overworked, that they are under ridiculous pressure, that they feel undervalued and unmotivated – but a couple of conversations this week have got me wondering whether the opposite, an unpressured culture, whilst not as destructive, may nevertheless be undesirable, albeit for different […]
30 things you should tell employees before you change the culture
Reading Time: 2 minutesBy Mark Di Somma What sort of information should decision makers share with employees as an organisation prepares to go through a significant cultural shift? These are my thoughts sized in digestible chunks. Order of course may vary. 1. The future that we now see for the organisation 2. How we discovered that we […]
Fighting the fadar
Reading Time: 5 minutesWe now have greater access to ideas than ever before, but the ideas themselves, it seems to me, have a much shorter half-life. New thinking, new people, new everything are presented to us at a dizzying pace – in editorial, feeds, slide decks, talks, videos, articles, almost everywhere one cares to look. In an age […]
Brand repositioning: Radicalising your brand
Reading Time: 5 minutesComes a point in the lifecycle of most brands when they hit critical complacency. The marque has mainstreamed to the point where it effectively blends with its surroundings to form part of the amorphous middle. That’s the black hole towards which all brands are drawn. Competitiveness erodes. Prices start to fall. Comfort levels and intransigence […]
5 reasons why cultures don’t change willingly
Reading Time: 2 minutesHere’s some great insights for anyone involved in making change programmes or new ideas work. The key to successfully transforming organisations doesn’t lie in explaining what’s required. It actually lies in better understanding what people feel threatened by. In this article in Reuters from some time back, David Rock takes the view that “People are […]
Brands and boundaries
Reading Time: < 1 minuteMarketers face this dilemma every day. They must push some boundaries past the point of pain in order to get the jump and be competitive. At the same time, they must clearly stay within constraints such as ethics and regulatory requirements in order to retain integrity, reputation and a clean record.
An unnatural state of work
Reading Time: < 1 minuteIt continues to fascinate me how little some businesses still seem to understand their human factors as opposed to their people model. They know how their workforce is organised. They understand where they’re allocated. They know what they cost. They have processes for everything they do. But they still seem to lack the anthropological understanding […]
Declaration: Step 5 in building a purposeful culture
Reading Time: 2 minutesAt some point, a culture that is serious about what it intends must put those intentions in writing. That’s about a lot more than documentation. Declaring what you come to work for collectively amounts to a commitment. So many companies squander this opportunity in my view. They market what is happening rather than explaining it. […]
For brand’s sake, mind your language
Reading Time: 3 minutesLanguage is one of the most important definers of any organisational culture. The language you choose, the language you don’t choose and the language you choose to replace are a reflection, and in some senses, a definition of your priorities. As the American writer Rita Mae Brown once observed, “Language is the road map of […]