My mother, who typically signaled her impending words of wisdom with, "Well, you know what they say," told me more than once, "Two heads are better than one." The value of collaboration — two or more people working together to achieve or create the same thing — has been [...]
In the third paragraph of this article, Augusto Giacoman states a hard truth about leading change: "People will not believe a message that presses the case for change if they don't believe the messenger." We at Expressworks agree. Credibility is critical to effective change leadership. Unless leaders establish credibility [...]
Resistance to Change in Organizations Comes from these Five Factors We know that businesses, if they are to thrive, must change over time. We also know that human beings resist change. Since businesses are made up of human beings, we have a classic catch-22 situation – a dilemma of [...]
How to Prepare for a Crisis You Couldn't Possibly Predict Most of us in the change business spend our energies planning for changes we know will happen — a system upgrade or new implementation, organizational restructure, or a merger / acquisition. While we can manage planned changes, what happens [...]
The first sentences of this article grab your attention like the opening lines of a good novel. But Bryan Walker and Sarah Soule aren’t writing fiction; they’re describing the elusive force that drives most businesses: culture. “Culture,” the authors say, “is like the wind. It is invisible, yet its [...]
I hope that with age comes a little wisdom, and since my years place me far closer to autumn than spring, I write this to share what I think is a life lesson about trust. What I've learned is this: a sure-fire way to build trust is to do [...]
Change requires doing things differently. And doing things differently requires dealing with the uncomfortable, the awkward, and the difficult. I love finding simple concepts that help explain complexity, especially when it’s the complexity I’m particularly passionate about: change – individual and organizational. (They are really the same since organizations [...]
Since I have become dependent on getting short bursts of information from the small devices I hold in my hand, this article on organizational culture change by John Kotter fits comfortably into my device-sized frame of mind. First, it's short. Second, it contains two of the most impactful paragraphs on [...]
As a woman who has lived through the civil rights and women’s movements from the sixties to the present, Melinda Gates’ study on gender equality in tech companies brings disappointing news on both fronts. “Unsurprisingly, the gender gap in computing degrees translates to a gender gap in the tech [...]
While there is a question about who actually said, “Culture eats strategy for breakfast (or lunch),” there is little disagreement about the impact of culture on the workings of a company. This is probably why Harvard Business Review dedicates a five-article spotlight to “The Culture Factor” in its January-February [...]