From the category archives:

culture

The CEO Drives the Brand and the Culture

by Pete Abilla July 1, 2010

While most Lean efforts are often bottom-up (some middle) and few are top-down, the CEO drives the brand and the overall culture of the company. Put another way, how the CEO is (their being, not just outward behavior – but who they are) – in large part, describes what the rest of the company is [...]

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Defining Corporate Culture

by Pete Abilla April 13, 2010

Defining culture is difficult.  Most change management consultants would say that a culture is defined by our language, behaviors, and interactions. Anthropologists go a step further by saying that culture is defined more by what is absent than what is present. In a recent meeting I attended, a question was asked regarding culture and what [...]

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Complacency, Urgency, and Change

by Pete Abilla November 22, 2009
This entry is part 2 of 12 in the series Turnaround, Transformation, and Change Management

John Kotter makes a good case that urgency is the key ingredient in any organizational transformation.  Conversely, the lower the urgency, the higher the likelihood that the firm will collapse or fail or not transform in a way that will enable it to win in a changing marketplace.  Kotter does something else that is interesting: [...]

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Homogeneous Innovation

by Pete Abilla November 17, 2009

Things are all too familiar. That’s good and bad. It’s good if the service or product meets my basic needs and is memory-neutral: that is, the interaction results in neither good memory or bad memory.  It just is and I don’t care. It’s not good if I come away from the experience thinking “I could [...]

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A Transformation Story

by Pete Abilla November 8, 2009
This entry is part 5 of 12 in the series Turnaround, Transformation, and Change Management

We all love stories.  Stories have characters that we relate to or hate, there’s drama, heroes and villains, and the best stories stir the emotion.  The same goes for companies and their stories – all companies have a story.  Most stories are in-process still, whereas some have ended, such as the story of Enron.  What [...]

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Why Transformation Efforts Fail

by Pete Abilla September 28, 2009
This entry is part 3 of 12 in the series Turnaround, Transformation, and Change Management

Transformation or Change efforts sometimes fail.  In fact, the numbers are staggering – most of them fail.  While the root cause is wide and varied, there are general themes or characteristics that are important to keep in mind in your own transformation efforts.  Think of these as symptoms also — that a failure is around [...]

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Turnaround and Change Management: Do Not Waste a Good Crisis

by Pete Abilla September 3, 2009
This entry is part 1 of 12 in the series Turnaround, Transformation, and Change Management

I’ve been part of several turnarounds and have led a few in my short career. One thing that I’ve learned is this: one cannot underestimate the people-side of a turnaround.  In fact, it’s very likely that your turnaround will fail, if your people aren’t with you. In this article, I’ll share a simple, pragmatic model [...]

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Amazon and Zappos Sitting in a Tree

by Pete Abilla July 22, 2009

As most you know by now, Zappos has entered into a definitive agreement with Amazon.com and will become a wholly owned subsidiary of Amazon.  This is exciting and, after speaking with my friends both at Amazon and at Zappos, they are all quite excited too.  Congratulations to Amazon, Zappos, Tony Hsieh, and Jeff Bezos 1  [...]

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The Profit Tree is not the only Tree

by Pete Abilla February 6, 2009

In this very tough economic environment, organizations turn more and more focus on the Profit Tree.  The course of history shows us that zeitgeist — or the movement of history at certain points of time — is a cascading phenomena where the collective focus and worldview is taken-on by large groups of people. It seems [...]

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