Posts tagged culture
Brent Gleeson:
A strong culture isn’t something you wish into place, or even will into place. It’s something you build. Here’s how.
He had me at #1:
Define values and ingrain them in everything you do.
Grant McCracken, via Wired.com
(via stoweboyd)
(via stoweboyd)
Tim Cook is giving us a history-in-the-making look at leadership today (the value of ALAKA‘I). A few quotes:
What shocked the Apple investors that day, was that CEO Tim Cook popped into the room about 20 minutes into Oppenheimer’s talk, quietly sat down in the back of the room, and did something unusual for a CEO of Apple: He listened. He didn’t check his e-mail once. He didn’t interrupt. After the CFO finished, Cook, at that point chief executive of Apple for all of five months, stood to offer his remarks. He strode confidently to the front of the room and held court in the no-nonsense style that has become his trademark. “He was in complete control and knew exactly who he was and where he wanted to go,” says one of the investors. “He answered every question head-on and didn’t skirt any issue.” … Steve Jobs wouldn’t have bothered.
A 14-year veteran of the company, Cook is maintaining, by words and actions, most of Apple’s unique corporate culture. But shifts of behavior and tone are absolutely apparent; some of them affect the core of Apple’s critical product-development process. In general, Apple has become slightly more open and considerably more corporate. In some cases Cook is taking action that Apple sorely needed and employees badly wanted. It’s almost as if he is working his way through a to-do list of long-overdue repairs the previous occupant (Jobs) refused to address for no reason other than obstinacy.
Cook consistently pays homage to the legacy of Jobs, but he doesn’t apologize for charting a new course. He seems, at the end of the day, to be honoring one of Jobs’ dying requests: that Apple’s management not ask “What would Steve do?” and instead do what’s best for Apple.
Considering the widespread hand wringing over how rudderless Apple would be without Jobs, it is remarkable how steadily the company has sailed along without him.
Tim Cook at a March event introducing the new iPad in San Francisco
Even as he tweaks the Apple operating manual, Cook goes to great pains to pledge allegiance to the corporate culture Steve Jobs created. Asked at the Goldman investor forum how his leadership might change Apple and what of its culture he intended to maintain, Cook ignored the first part of the question and focused only on the latter. “Steve grilled in all of us over many years that the company should revolve around great products and that we should stay extremely focused on few things rather than try to do so many that we did nothing well.” He called Apple a “magical place” where employees could do “their life’s best work.”
For their part, most Apple employees seem more than satisfied with Cook. … At Apple, Jobs was simultaneously revered, loved, and feared. Cook clearly is a demanding boss, but he’s not scary. He’s well-respected, but not worshiped. As Apple enters a complex new phase of its corporate history, perhaps it doesn’t need a god as CEO but a mere mortal who understands how to get the job done.
What we in Hawaii can learn from another island community:
EVERY so often someone asks me: “What’s your favorite country, other than your own?”
I’ve always had the same answer: Taiwan. “Taiwan? Why Taiwan?” people ask.
Very simple: Because Taiwan is a barren rock in a typhoon-laden sea with no natural resources to live off of — it even has to import sand and gravel from China for construction — yet it has the fourth-largest financial reserves in the world. Because rather than digging in the ground and mining whatever comes up, Taiwan has mined its 23 million people, their talent, energy and intelligence — men and women.…Societies that get addicted to their natural resources seem to develop parents and young people who lose some of the instincts, habits and incentives for doing homework and honing skills.
By contrast, says Schleicher, “in countries with little in the way of natural resources — Finland, Singapore or Japan — education has strong outcomes and a high status, at least in part because the public at large has understood that the country must live by its knowledge and skills and that these depend on the quality of education. … Every parent and child in these countries knows that skills will decide the life chances of the child and nothing else is going to rescue them, so they build a whole culture and education system around it.”
Or as my Indian-American friend K. R. Sridhar, the founder of the Silicon Valley fuel-cell company Bloom Energy, likes to say, “When you don’t have resources, you become resourceful.”
…In these difficult economic times, it is tempting to buttress our own standards of living today by incurring even greater financial liabilities for the future. To be sure, there is a role for stimulus in a prolonged recession, but “the only sustainable way is to grow our way out by giving more people the knowledge and skills to compete, collaborate and connect in a way that drives our countries forward,” argues Schleicher.
In sum, says Schleicher, “knowledge and skills have become the global currency of 21st-century economies, but there is no central bank that prints this currency. Everyone has to decide on their own how much they will print.” Sure, it’s great to have oil, gas and diamonds; they can buy jobs. But they’ll weaken your society in the long run unless they’re used to build schools and a culture of lifelong learning. “The thing that will keep you moving forward,” says Schleicher, is always “what you bring to the table yourself.”
Received these questions from a friend of mine, a professor teaching a college course on the “Emotional Health in Organizations” and thought I’d share my answer with all of you who read Talking Story as well:
How does one effectively “lead up” in their organization, if it is still managed like the Industrial Revolution? How does one BEST change the culture from within? Is it REALLY possible…since the key leader always defines the culture of the organization????
Yes, it’s possible, if you are willing to do what it takes…
This is something I started doing back in 2009 using Evernote: Love that my entries there are searchable and tag-able, and that personal photos can be included, for pictures can say a thousand words…
As Tom says, looking back on these journaling entries is a lot of fun, and it can help push me in the ways I move forward too.
My own takeaway from reading his post, is that I can add in more cultural notes to my snapshot, thereby coloring in the background of my personal data with world-view context.
Also see:
The Food At Our Feet: Why is Foraging All the Rage?
I spent the summer foraging, like an early hominid with clothes. It didn’t matter that the first thing I learned about that daunting pastime of hunter-gatherers and visionary chefs was that nature’s bounty is a thorny gift. Thorny, or, if you prefer, spiny, prickly, buggy, sticky, slimy, muddy, and, occasionally, so toxic that one of the books I consulted for my summer forays carried a disclaimer absolving the publisher of responsibility should I happen to end up in the hospital or, worse, in the ground, moldering next to the Amanita phalloides that I’d mistaken for a porcini. I was not deterred.
- Jane Kramer examines the pursuit of wild food w/ René Redzepi, of Copenhagen’s Noma, “the best restaurant in the world”: http://nyr.kr/rNPHY0
LOVED reading this article (the equivalent of 7 web “pages”) with my morning coffee - it’s a read slowly to savor the senses kind of article one mustn’t rush. It’s what magazines should be publishing these days, but with a generosity of more photos, if they wish to survive the digital trends which have struck newspapers with deathly blows.
There is so much which evokes Sense of Place (MWA Key 8) in this article, and how it connects to the value of ‘Ike loa (lifelong, and life-connected learning). One example:
“We had the idea: let’s use local products here,” he told me the next morning. We were at a diner, making a caffeine stop on the way to a beach at Dragør—a town on the Øresund Sea, about twenty minutes from the outskirts of Copenhagen—where he likes to forage. “But I was very unhappy at first. Why? Because we were taking recipes from other cultures, serving essentially the same ‘Scandinavian French’ food, and just because you’re using local produce to make that food doesn’t mean you’re making a food of your own culture. I started asking myself, What is a region? What is the sum of the people we are, the culture we are? What does it taste like? What does it look like on a plate? It was a very complex thing for us—the idea of finding a new flavor that was ‘ours.’ ”
My name is Allison, I’m a 13 year old 8th grader. I only get a few hours of sleep at night, but I don’t tell my parents because they don’t need to know that I need sleeping pills. I’ve been showing symptoms of Schizophrenia but we can’t afford for me to go see a doctor about it. My parents get really scared when they have to pay the morage because it really cuts down on our money. I’ve stopped eating alot so there’s more food for everyone else.
My parents don’t know that I know we’re the 99%.
This hit me on a very visceral level today. I wrote about it on Talking Story: “My parents don’t know that I know.”
The Managers’ Kuleana
Those who have heard me speak know I make this point as often as I can about Kuleana, our profound responsibility as managers:
If the children of your employees believe that working imprisons their parents and makes them grumpy people, it’s your fault. Hold yourself accountable for that, and fix it. Those children are going to grow up, and be our workforce one day: What attitude do we want them to bring to the workplace with them?
Richard Florida, Where the Skills Are | The Atlantic
Florida is speaking of the effect of urban living in this article (it’s an interesting read), however for me, The Daily 5 Minutes comes to mind yet again - in any working environment, D5M is that place too, “where the conversation and culture are the most stimulating.”
Sept.15 Update: Florida has posted a “cutting room floor quilting” of “Where the Skills Are” at today’s launch of the Atlantic Cities project: Rise of the Social City
Why is Japan going back to work?
I went to work today. Normally that wouldn’t merit a blog post, but in a country with nuclear emergencies, multiple earthquakes, rolling power outages and an active volcano, the normal stuff starts to get noteworthy.
Am learning more, and getting more witness-based news from Eryk, a former newspaper editor from Maine now teaching English in Japan with the JET Program. He writes:
The nation’s geographical position has ensured that disaster is a part of the landscape.
This has contributed to two survival mechanisms in Japanese culture: It’s own brand of resigned pragmatism and an organic respect for social order.
Do follow the link and get introduced to his blog. His newest post is equally provocative: On Watching the News in Japan
