Entries by Nathan Ives

Organizational Accountability – Evaluating Organizational Culture, part 2

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An organization’s culture – its commonly shared values and beliefs – is both highly complex and interrelated. As such, no one cultural artifact should be used in isolation to describe an organization’s culture and each artifact contributes differently to the painting of the overall culture picture. Objectively viewing the collection of cultural artifacts and identifying their individual contribution significance is critically important to developing an accurate understanding of the organization’s culture.

Corporate Cultures – Identifying Your Organization’s Real Values

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While many organizations publish value statements, they tend to be rather general and lofty, indistinguishable for those of most other organizations. Other organizations have no values statement at all. Either circumstance makes it difficult for cultural analysts to divine where on the each value’s spectrum the organization resides and to ascertain the alignment between individual organizational groups to the values because of this lack of definition specificity.

Corporate Cultures – Overcoming Cultural Resistance to Change

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The firm hand of culture drives what, how, and why work gets done. Consequently, attempts to change established policies, processes, or practices will meet with a degree of cultural resistance. Therefore, the challenge for leaders becomes how to effectively implement needed change in spite of this resistance; especially if the foundational tenants of the organization’s culture must be preserved.

Leadership Lessons from the United States Naval Academy – Staying Informed of Current Events

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Organizations operate within the context of their environment; the military being no different than civilian businesses. During their plebe (freshman) year at the United States Naval Academy, midshipmen are required to read two news and one sports page article each day in order to remain up-to-date on those current events impacting our nation and its military. Plebes are tested on their news selections and overall knowledge by upper classmen to ensure they are both conversant and understand the importance of the newsworthy events. Thus, plebes have impressed upon them the value of remaining aware of current events.

Business Communications – Language and Words Matter

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Nowhere is it clearer than in politics that language matters. Indeed, we often hear about the ‘spin’ politicians follow-up with after using poorly chosen words or making a not so well thought-out statement. While we might criticize politicians’ use of key words and tricky phrases that we feel distort the meaning or interpretation of a set of circumstances, we should step back for a moment, consider why they do this, and learn from their example because language and words do matter.