The Authentic Organization

Leaders set the tone for an organization, serve as its public face, and through their power, set in motion all sorts of dynamics. When a leader acts out their own fears and denial in the context of their role in an organization, it can poison everything. One of my readers wrote with an example (edited [...]

As I embarked on this project, I invited readers of Nonprofit Online News to share stories of authenticity and it absence. In most cases, I will obscure the identifying information about the people or the organizations involved. Although it’s not my favorite perspective, the conventional definition of a “social enterprise” is an organization or a [...]

Most of the nearly 1000 organizations with which I’ve worked would object profoundly to the idea that grieving is even a legitimate organizational ability and many others would be merely puzzled. What the hell is Michael talking about now? I’m not talking about an organizational version of crying and wailing. Nor am I saying that [...]

In The To Do Addiction, I described our focus on the unfinished as a kind of brutal lack of gratitude. What would it mean to turn that around? Does gratitude play a role in creating an authentic environment? To the extent that we distort our thinking by obsessing about the unfinished, by noticing only what [...]

In the early Nineties, I used to teach a workshop called Making a Living, Making a Difference. One of the things I explored in that workshop is the perverse relationship we have to the word “work”. I’m not going to debate here what the word truly means or doesn’t mean. Rather, I’m interested in what [...]