The Authentic Organization

Imagine this scenario: You receive an unexpected inheritance that enables you to quit the job that has eaten up so much of your time, get some well-deserved rest, and then spend the time you previously dedicated to the job (and commuting to the job and recovering from the job) on your kids and your art. [...]

Although I am firmly allied with the mission and spirit of all the professionals and organizations who use the term “work-life balance” as something to strive for, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s fundamentally flawed, a dangerous trap, an all-around bad idea.
Superficially Sensible
The concept is enormously popular - over 10 million results for “work-life [...]

Maybe I shouldn’t read Fast Company, but I do. I also read sites that reduce complex ideas into a series of bulleted “hacks” and mainstream news sites that can’t seem to step even a millimeter outside the guiding tropes of our very painful times.
If it’s just an occasional craving for outrage, then I can [...]

It is sometimes said that a narrow self-image prevented the wealthy American railroad companies from investing in automobiles and airplanes in the first half of the twentieth century. They saw themselves as being in the railway business, rather than in the transportation business. Thus, by the middle of the century, the modes of transportation that [...]

Imagine you receive a conventionally formatted memo at work, the contents of which read “Please return this memo immediately” along with instructions on where to do so. Because you are right this moment reading a post about mindless behavior in organizations, you probably think that you would see the memo as some sort of joke. [...]

As I see it, social and personal change comes about through an honest and transparent commitment to two sides of an endless contradiction: The world as it is and the world as we wish it were. We can’t trade one for the other. We have to embrace both in order to make change.
That is why [...]

I learned how to behave properly at an adult dinner table at a pretty young age. But when I moved to the United States at the age of 13, I discovered that some American families have very different rules of conversation than those I had become familiar with in Europe. All the topics that I [...]

I recently read (and reread) a short book by Jerr Boschee called From Innovation to Entrepreneurship. Despite some misgivings about some early assumptions, I rather liked this book and I consider it an important contribution to the future of civil society. The book presents a number of “critical success factors” for entrepreneurship and one of [...]

Over the years, I often get asked questions about how to communicate something with a donor. For example: We have all these email addresses, but we haven’t sent anything to them for many months or more. We finally want to start a newsletter, which we had only previously hinted at. What do we say to [...]

A few days ago, I wrote a short piece on the idea of an organizational obituary as a tool for deepening authenticity. With the feedback I’ve received, it’s become clear that there are some ambiguities in the practice that prevent it from being as useful as we might like. These ambiguities are identical to those [...]