Is your company fair? Is fairness part of your MAP? Are you fair to your people? How often have you heard (or said), “That’s not fair!”
People accept that life isn’t fair—more or less. Whereas you can’t walk away from life, but it’s relatively easy to walk away from a company or manager you perceive as unfair.
What do people expect within the business world in terms of fairness?
The obvious is that they don’t want to be shafted a la Enron. However, fairness refers to more than the obvious, most often to the company/manager doing what they said they would do, i.e., …read more

Company culture is a hot topic in the business press; CEOs are working to foster “cultures of innovation;” and culture is being lauded or blamed for a variety of happenings.
The bird’s eye view of what’s important in culture is as varied as the executives, academics, pundits, media and other experts who expound on the subject.
But what about the worm’s eye view—what do plain vanilla employees think and want? It’s important, since without them there is no company.
It used to be when I talked with people that it was easier for them to articulate the attitudes and behaviors they didn’t want …read more

Innovation is crucial to success, especially in today’s economy, and diversity is crucial to innovation.
But diversity refers to much more than race, creed, or gender.
Juicing creativity and innovation requires a strong diversity of both thought and skills within your organization—homogenizing your workforce dilutes the juice.
Thought Diversity
True mental diversity is about MAP and mental function, not just a race and gender. I’ve known managers whose organizations were mini-UNs with equal numbers of males and females, but they might as well have been cloned from the boss, their thinking was so identical.
There are three main ways to homogenize thought

Hire all the same …read more

I received and email in response to last Tuesday’s post about the value of adding QF to your culture’s DNA that absolutely floored me.
“Jess” said that “the disruption caused by indulging in QF” was expensive and difficult considering today’s economy. He said that this wasn’t the time to look for innovation, but to focus on survival; and that even in good times innovation was expensive and not all companies could afford that level of brain power.
Granted, a lot of CEOs have a hunker down mentality right now, but even casual reading will show that the smartest companies, whether large or …read more

My regular readers know that normally Wordless Wednesday is truly wordless, but all good rules have exceptions and flexibility is a virtue.
The video is a great example of how an innovative combination of socially unacceptable food and a culture of exceptional customer care turned a restaurant into a destination and a major hit with people who aren’t intimidated by the food police. Heart Attack Grill here we come! (Good grief, a reason to go to Chandler, Ariz.)

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That’s innovation you can eat, now for innovation you can drive.
Honda has a culture that’s known to not just tolerate failure, …read more