culture

What do stick figures, surveys, and lots of Post-It notes have in common?

Badges, of course! It’s all part of an increasingly multifaceted and exciting project the Open.Michigan team has embarked on over the past ten months. While we’ve been dedicating time and energy to our badging project since spring 2011, it all started back in fall 2010 when we began an evaluation of the impact of the Open.Michigan initiative. » Read more

Understanding a company’s culture is a key component that leaders may ignore. When I took on a new role, an updated strategy was cited as top priority. What the team needed was a culture boost. I focused on culture management to change the “delegate up” practices and effectively implement strategy. It's an ongoing process of encouraging people to take the risks associated with making their own decisions, but it's paying off with faster decision-making, improved performance, and higher morale. » Read more

Vodafone believes that working smarter will help businesses survive and thrive in a challenging economic climate. The mobile group's UK operating company is undergoing a seismic cultural shift, using its own technology to introduce a new way of working, which it believes will provide a blueprint for all businesses and organisations in the 21st century. At the heart of this transformation is the notion that it is not just what you do, but how you do it that determines business success.

Over the past two years, Vodafone UK has demonstrated new ways of working that combine » Read more

This is the story of a college class taught inside an open source community. Last fall, I taught Release Engineering to a small group of undergraduates at Olin College, an engineering school a few miles outside Boston. The goal was to teach them how to become functional technical contributors to an open source project--without writing any code. In the hopes that others will be inspired to teach similar classes, I've written our experiences up as a case study in three pieces: cultural, technical, and "getting real." » Read more

"Even with the sacred printing press, we got erotic novels 150 years before we got scientific journals."

- Clay Shirky at TED Cannes in June 2010

This is one of my favorite quotes from one of my favorite people in the business, Clay Shirky. I particularly like it because it illustrates the period many organizations find themselves in when trying to integrate social media internally. Before wikis were used by the Intelligence Community to develop reports on IEDs, people were creating user badges to show off their favorite NFL teams. Before my own company's Intranet won any awards, we had people talking about how they enjoy skinny dipping on their profile. Before our VPs starting using Yammer to communicate with the workforce, we had groups of Android geeks and fitness gurus.I'm telling you this because if you're implementing any type of social media behind your organizational firewall, you should prepare yourself, your colleagues, your bosses, your senior leadership for this one inexorable truth. » Read more

Can an entrenched bureaucracy, encumbered by a rigid culture and public records compliance adapt open source ways to collaborate more effectively? Is it like pulling teeth just to get people to share ideas? Is that devil's advocate bringing your team down? If you want results, try something different. Use open communications and transparency with your team. You might be surprised how these open source pillars will create the ownership and accountability to achieve your desired results.

Imagine you came from a world were the freedom to share and collaborate were the way your organization survived. Can you apply this recipe to government? » Read more

Scott Keller contributed to this article.

You've begun to make major changes at your company. Maybe you've decided to restructure your business to reach new markets or perhaps you're cutting costs in response to a crisis. » Read more

If you missed Clay Shirky's Open Your World Forum Webcast last week, you may have missed his observation about how new forms of communication succeed or fail. The initial uses of a new medium do not always fortell their ultimate importance. » Read more

In our experience, every marketing team is different--but increasingly they have a few things in common. For a start, it's rare to find the whole team in any single place on any given day. More often, we find teams distributed across cities, countries, and fairly frequently, continents. The members of a team have also changed: full time employees are usually in the minority among a collection of contractors, freelancers, and agencies who are treated as an integrated part of the team, rather than a simple supplier. » Read more

In October 1969, when experts at the US Department of Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) connected the first two nodes of what has now become the Internet, they probably weren’t considering the ramifications of their actions on future organizational cultures. But while these DARPA folks likely wouldn’t have considered themselves management innovators, the Internet they created has rocked the traditional management science to its core. » Read more