On Decision Making

Decision making is a stream of inquiry, not an event. Decision-driven organizations design and manage it as such: they match decision-making styles to appropriate techniques and, wherever possible, encourage parties to play roles rife with dissent and debate; decision rights are part of the design. (No. 118 | July 2012)

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Innovation in the Public Sector

Innovation is something that is new, capable of being implemented, and has a beneficial impact. It is not an event or activity; it is a concept, process, practice, and capability that defines successful organizations. Innovation in the public sector can help create value for society. (No. 117 | June 2012)

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Knowledge as Culture

Culture must not be seen as something that merely reflects an organization's social reality: rather, it is an integral part of the process by which that reality is constructed. Knowledge management initiatives, per se, are not culture change projects; but, if culture stands in the way of what an organization needs to do, they must somehow impact. (No. 116 | May 2012)

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Managing Knowledge in Project Environments

Projects ought to be vehicles for both practical benefits and organizational learning. However, if an organization is designed for the long term, a project exists only for its duration. Project-based organizations face an awkward dilemma: the project-centric nature of their work makes knowledge management, hence learning, difficult. (No. 115 | April 2012)

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Business Model Innovation

Who is your customer? What does the customer value? How do you deliver value to customers at an appropriate cost? Business models that focus on the who, what, and how to clarify managerial choices and their consequences underpin the operations of successful organizations. (No. 111 | January 2012)

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Moral Courage in Organizations

Moral courage is the strength to use ethical principles to do what one believes is right even though the result may not be to everyone's liking or could occasion personal loss. In organizations, some of the hardest decisions have ethical stakes: it is everyday moral courage that sets an organization and its members apart. (No. 103 | June 2011)

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Managing Corporate Reputation

Newly minted approaches to corporate reputation are already obsolete. Beyond gaining control of issues, crisis, and corporate social responsibility, organizations need to reconceptualize and manage reputation in knowledge-based economies. (No. 102 | May 2011)

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The Travails of Micromanagement

Micromanagement is mismanagement. What is it that one should decide in the higher echelons of an organization that, given the same data and information, personnel in the lower echelons might not run just as well? (No. 100 | March 2011)

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Primer on Corporate Governance

Good corporate governance helps an organization achieve its objectives; poor corporate governance can speed its decline or demise. Never before has the glare of the spotlight focused so much on boards of directors. Corporate governance has emerged from obscurity and become a mainstream topic. (No. 98 | January 2011)

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Forestalling Change Fatigue

It is a given that organizational change affects people. It is people, not processes or technology, who embrace or not a situation and carry out or neglect corresponding actions. People will help build what they create. (No. 97 | December 2010)

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Engaging Staff in the Workplace

Surveys present clear and mounting evidence that staff engagement correlates closely with individual, collective, and corporate performance. It denotes the extent to which organizations gain commitment from personnel. (No. 93 | October 2010)

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The Perils of Performance Measurement

Interest in performance measurement grows daily but the state of the art leaves much to be desired. To promote performance leadership, one must examine both its shortcomings and its pernicious effects. (No. 84 | May 2010)

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Seeding Knowledge Solutions Before, During, and After

In the age of competence, one must learn before, during, and after the event. Knowledge solutions lie in the areas of strategy development, management techniques, collaboration mechanisms, knowledge sharing and learning, and knowledge capture and storage. (No. 82 | April 2010)

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Crafting a Knowledge Management Results Framework

Managing for results requires a coherent framework for strategic planning, management, and communications based on continuous learning and accountability. Results frameworks improve management effectiveness by defining realistic expected results, monitoring progress toward their achievement, integrating lessons into decisions, and reporting on performance. (No. 80 | March 2010)

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Sparking Innovations in Management

Gary Hamel defines management innovation as a marked departure from traditional management principles, processes, and practices (or a departure from customary organizational forms that significantly alters the way the work of management is performed). He deems it the prime driver of sustainable competitive advantage in the 21st century. (No. 77 | March 2010)

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New-Age Branding and the Public Sector

Branding is a means to identify a company's products or services, differentiate them from those of others, and create and maintain an image that encourages confidence among clients, customers, and audiences. Until the mid-1990s, brand management—based on the 4Ps of product (or service), place, price, and promotion—aimed to engineer additional value from single brands. The idea of organizational branding has since developed, with implications for behavior and behavioral change, and is making inroads into the public sector too. (No. 71 | January 2010)

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Fast and Effective Change Management

When embarking on a change initiative, one should rapidly implement change that results in the higher levels of performance that were envisioned when the decision to make the changes was made. To make this happen, organizations must first overcome the resistance to change and then secure as much discretionary effort as possible. (No. 70 | December 2009)

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A Primer on Organizational Learning

Organizational learning is the ability of an organization to gain insight and understanding from experience through experimentation, observation, analysis, and a willingness to examine successes and failures. There are two key notions: organizations learn through individuals who act as agents for them; at the same time, individual learning in organizations is facilitated or constrained by its learning system. (No. 69 | December 2009)

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A Primer on Organizational Culture

Culture guides the way individuals and groups in an organization interact with one another and with parties outside it. It is the premier competitive advantage of high-performance organizations. Sadly, for others, organizational culture is the most difficult attribute to change: it outlives founders, leaders, managers, products, services, and well-nigh the rest. It is best improved by organizational learning for change. (No. 68 | November 2009)

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Understanding Complexity

In development agencies, paradigms of linear causality condition much thinking and practice. They encourage command-and-control hierarchies, centralize decision making, and dampen creativity and innovation. Globalization demands that organizations see our turbulent world as a collection of evolving ecosystems. To survive and flourish they must then be adaptable and fleet-footed. Notions of complexity offer a wealth of insights and guidance to 21st century organizations that strive to do so. (No. 66 | November 2009)

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