ChangeThis RSS
"If the economic crisis has taught us anything, it's that putting our faith in the market alone will not work. New institutions are needed to harness powerful new economic forces, to address worsening class divides, and to make society and the economy work for all of us. We desperately need to institute and ratify a new social compact, entailing everything from investment in our human capital, the only real capital we have, to a new approach to education and learning. We need to recommit our economy to innovation, our society to openness and diversity, and we need to knit a new safety net for the truly disadvantaged. We need a complete break with the old Fordist order. It's time to forge a new society that reflects the demands, challenges, and opportunities of the Creative Age."
Continue reading
"Every organization needs a Culturematic laboratory... It gives the senior manager a "landing party" with which to search for navigable spaces, habitable worlds, futures we want as opposed to ones that will be otherwise forced upon us. Managers can wait for the future to "happen" to them. Or they can use Culturematics and choose. Culturematic labs are a new management tool."
Continue reading
"The Shattering is the moment where everything familiar slips away. Our protective facades of familiarity spontaneously combust and we shun faith, deny comfort. We're left voiceless regardless of our need to scream. We tread water in an ocean filled with every brilliant memory of what was only moments ago. Life has a cruel way of serving up The Shatterings, too. Nary a Google or Outlook Calendar would deign to accept the meeting and we're left simply wondering
What. The Fuck. Happened?
Over the past seventeen months, I've become a student of that question. In the process, I've gone through even more Shatterings. And I've come to one invaluable realization:
I've been asking the wrong question.
I shouldn't concern myself with what happened. I should be asking, 'What's happening?'"
Continue reading
"What has happened to leadership? With all the crises and challenges we face and the increasingly risk-averse environment in which we operate, leadership has become generic, ephemeral, and bland.
We have devolved from leaders into managers. Admiral Grace Murray Hopper said it best—you manage things, but you lead people. The problem is we're no longer leading. We're hiding behind committees. We're using the crutches of data and metrics to make our decisions for us. We blame policies and corporate culture for the problems our teams face rather than delivering the tough messages with a sense of ownership.
The result of all of this is our people don't trust us anymore. Work has become transactional. They do the work and we pay them. It's a fee-for-service mindset. When they find someone who will pay them more for their services, they're gone. And when we no longer have need of their services, we simply cast those people aside. It's a toxic environment. It's hard for people to trust their leaders when they feel like they're simply a cog in the machine."
Continue reading
"It is undeniable that Facebook, the king of the social media hill, has accumulated a huge number of users who spend growing amounts of time on the site. Its growth and ability to attract a loyal and highly networked audience is to be admired. For brands, however, it is far from the Holy Grail of marketing. Facebook and other online social networks represent merely one channel out of many that marketers can tap to spark a powerful word of mouth wave. And when looked at in the context of the 'total social' opportunity, it is but one very small part of the overall picture and needs to be seen as such. And true to Naisbitt's 'high tech, high touch' megatrend, the fact is that online social networking is no substitute for the power and impact of face-to-face communications. Real world conversations—most of which take place face-to-face—are still the dominant mode of communication, and they are the most trusted and persuasive."
Continue reading