Organizational Change

HBS Working Knowledge: Innovation: Sometimes Success Begins at Failure I don’t know how many times the idea of building a knowledge base of failed efforts in order to learn from them has come up, but somehow nobody takes it seriously enough to do it. I understand, however, that the US Army has a department of Lessons Learned at some place ...

In a Harvard Business Review article (reprint available here) entitled “Are Your Employees Bowling Alone? How to Build a Trusting Organization,” author Douglas Smith appied Robert Putnam’s (Bowling Alone) concepts of social capital to business. Bowling alone was Putnam’s metaphor for the civic disengagement: in 15 years, the numbers of bowlers grew, but much fewer were bowling in leagues. The ...

The report on the dysfunctional management culture at NASA that contributed to the destruction of the shuttle Columbia shows that corporate culture can be a killer, literally.

Fast Company Now You management mavens may want to check-out Fast Company’s weblog. It’s a pretty good example of blogging for exchange of information (although FC has been called “pornography for middle-managers”: tantalizing fantasies of non-hierarchical management, entrepreneurial employees, and lightning-fast innovation–things that never seem to come true in real organizational life).