30 Tuesday Dec 2014
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Here’s a good article on employee burnout and work overload. But, it is quite interesting that after all the statements about overload, the section “What managers need to do” says nothing at all about reducing the overload and pushing back, just ways to react to it. It is almost suggest that this is sacrosanct, and we all have no ability to do anything about it.
http://www.tlnt.com/2014/12/23/will-2015-be-the-year-of-worrying-about-employee-burnout/
Cross-posted from Facebook via IFTTT
08 Tuesday Jul 2014
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Business Insider shared this image from Richard D. Lewis’ book, When Cultures Collide: Leading Across Cultures (Nicholas Brealey Publishing 2006), which I found quite interesting. Richard D. Lewis is the founder of the Berlitz Schools of Languages, and creator of the Lewis Cross-Cultural Communication model that classifies cultural norms.
The author developed a visual metaphor to describe how people negotiate deals through conversations and interaction, shown here across American, Canadian, English, French, Italian, German, Chinese (mainland), Hong Kong, Israeli, Indian, Swiss, Singaporean, Australian, Korean, Indonesian, Hungarian, Finnish, Norwegian, Danish, Norwegian, and more.
These are of course stereotypes and not all are flattering. But that positive or negative view of the interaction pattern also depends on the culture you are from. What you might consider inefficient in one view, others from that culture may consider yours too unfriendly. What I consider more significant is one’s ability to understand and work with other cultures regardless of the bias and conflict one might have.
Mr Lewis also has another book that bears investigation, When Teams Collide: Managing the International Team Successfully (2012) and is closer to work concerns in which I’m interested, particularly cultural views and being able to lead across cultures.
I think few people have the cultural and work experience to verify these patterns but perhaps we could do it through crowdsourcing. Anyone care to share their view of the pattern per their country’s culture?
Communications Patterns around the World.
07 Friday Jun 2013
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Dan Pontefract with his book, Flat Army (image: Dan Pontefract)
Serendipitous to the opening chapter of the book, The Mona Lisa Is So Small, I was at the Museé de Louvre visiting the magnificent collection of Italian masters when I received notification of a copy of Flat Army: Creating a Connected and Engaged Organization (Wiley 2013). My reaction was quite sympathetic to Mr. Pontecraft’s own experience per his introduction: Upon entry, crowds of people & tour groups would rush right away upstairs to see the Mona Lisa first and foremost ignoring master works all around for notoriety. Popularity by itself is not leadership in my view.
[Personally, I was enamored by the enormity of the Veronese Paolo Caliari’s,The Wedding Feast at Cana at the opposite end of the same room, for the fascinating amount of networking that occurs in any political wedding ceremony.]
Flat Army covers a lot of interesting idea sources from both the immediate management and social science fields but also a good deal of history and culture. From the idea of Guanxi to the Multilevel Neural Network of North East Italy; from the Christmas Truce of 1914 on the Western Front in World War I, to the sociology of why bus riders won’t share seats; from JP Rangaswami’s thoughts on trust, to Leo Apotheker’s brief but tumultuous and guarded reign at HP.
