What Great Companies Know About Culture - Deidre H. Campbell - Harvard Business Review

Even in this unprecedented business environment, great leaders know they should invest in their people. Those companies who are committed to a strong workplace culture tend to perform well, and now they are featured prominently in a new ranking recently released by Great Place to Work Institute. Among the top performers on the 2011 World's Best Multinational Companies list are culturally-strong technology companies such as Microsoft, NetApp, SAS, and Google. But is there a direct correlation between employee investment and the balance sheet? As Prof. James L. Heskett wrote in his latest book The Culture Cycle, effective culture can account for 20-30 percent of the differential in corporate performance when compared with "culturally unremarkable" competitors.

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Review of Creativity From Constraints: The Psychology Of Breakthrough by Patricia D. Stokes

Here is a review of Creativity from Contraints: The Psychology of Breakthrough by Patricia Stokes. Stokes is a former advertising graphic artist who became a psychologist following her desire to understand creative behaviour as she had observed it in her profession. In summary, Stokes proposes there are four main constraints to creativity - domain, cognition,variability, talent - and it is how come to understand and articulate these constraints in context that will enable the kind of creative behaviours reuired to  obtain decision making breakthroughs that can be considered creative as opposed to more of the same.   

Eight Things Stand-Up Comedy Teaches Us About Innovation | Co.Design

Every comedian has a process -- and at some point, they ditch it to follow their gut. Comedy, especially stand-up, is widely regarded as the most difficult gig in show business. Similarly, successful product innovation is so difficult, it could be regarded as the stand-up comedy of the business world. E.B. White once said that analyzing comedy is like dissecting a frog: Few people are interested and the frog dies of it. However, a sacrifice must be made to help more great ideas see the light of day, and studying how good comedians work can reveal insights into how innovation can benefit from the same advice.

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The Four Strands: Creating Companies Aligned With Human DNA - Dr Henry Cloud, Change This

“There are universal developmental issues and milestones in the construction of all people, which like gravity, must be obeyed. They are like the laws of physics, non-negotiable. Break these laws and dysfunction occurs. But, obey these laws and people thrive. They will be what we call “healthy.”

So, when a company is designed and operates in ways that are aligned with how people are constructed, it will be like an airplane aligned with the laws of physics that govern force or torque. It will reach the altitude, speed and course that its horsepower allows. But if its design is not aligned, it will fly in circles, stall out, crash, or break apart.”

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About Henry Cloud, Ph.D | Dr. Cloud is a psychologist, communicator and leadership coach. As the author of many best-selling books, his writing reflects experience not only in the clinical world, but the arenas of business, leadership consulting, and live audience interactions. For over twenty years, his practice has focused on working with leaders in a wide range of organizations and corporations, from family held firms to Fortune 25 and Fortune 500 companies. Dr. Cloud is the co-host of the nationally syndicated radio program New Life Live heard in over 150 markets with a weekly audience estimated at 2,000,000 listeners. He serves on the board of the Los Angeles Mission, a rescue mission on Skid Row in downtown Los Angeles, and lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Tori, and their two daughters, Olivia and Lucy.

The change-capable organization and the importance of metrics - accenture

One of the odd paradoxes of organizational change is that all the initiatives companies undertake to support major transformations—learning programs, structural changes, communications plans and the like—can actually prevent effective change as much as enable it. The enemy is time. It may take months to bring a team on board to design and execute a change program, then several more months to make the transition to a new way of working. By that time, who can be sure the initiative is even relevant to the real business issues of the day? Maybe, instead, the change program ends up being more like last year’s fashions—handsome and well crafted, but out of date.

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