As promised in my last blog post, this week we discuss how Newton’s second law of motion can be applied to changing workplace culture. The second law is more complex, but if you stick with me, I promise to use it to explain another big and painful challenge when creating change in workplace culture: resistance. Here’s Newton’s second law: F=ma. The vector sum …
I’ve been thinking about physics and workplace culture lately (please don’t hate me because I’m a bit of a geek). Physics has been around much longer than psychology and other disciplines that study culture. As a result, physics tends to have much more precise and measurable constructs than psychology. Today I want to share some of my thinking around changing …
This week I’ve been thinking a lot more about the concept of conceptual blindness. Last week, I stated that our perceptions are limited by our conceptions. We can only see what we can imagine, consider, and understand. If you can’t conceive it, you can’t perceive it. You can find this issue not only in psychology, but also in business, economics, …
Last week, I had a really interesting conversation with the CEO and CFO of a mid-sized company. They had requested a teleconference because they wanted to discuss the possibility of me helping them improve the performance of their “business partners.” The problem? They had recently experienced a decline in availability of their most seasoned business partners, all of whom were …
Integrity is about ensuring that your words are aligned with your actions. When a company announces its cause/purpose/values, it is making a statement about what it finds important and what will drive its decision making. However, when those words don’t govern the actual behaviors and decisions of senior leadership, the words ring hollow. Human beings easily identify hypocrisy; people smell …
As a CEO and/or leader of an organization, culture is your number one priority. One of the most important decisions leaders make is the type of norms one will bring into one’s organizational culture: “business norms” or “social norms.” Business norms are all those things we associate with business: quid pro quo, this for that, things are paid for in …
I’ve been speaking on the topic of culture for the past 10 years. I’ve been reading on the subject for more than 20 years. There are a lot of books published on culture. They all, including my own – Culture Trumps Everything – take a similar approach. They introduce a particular concept, explain why it is important to organizational culture, …
Human beings differ because of our culture, experiences and opportunities. I have a “life doppelganger.” Although my friend (we’ll call him “Nicolas”) and I don’t look alike, our early-life circumstances were virtually identical, particularly up to the age of three. We were both born in Argentina. We were both born into loving families, with two parents who were highly involved and …
In my travels, I have recently been asked by several people if implicit bias – also known as unconscious bias – is real. So I’ve decided to write about it here. Implicit bias refers to the beliefs and/or attitudes that influence our understanding, actions, and decisions in an unconscious manner. Now that we have a definition, does it really exist? …
Last week I had the opportunity to see two highly skilled, highly successful executives – both of whom have a history of effective communication – unravel and devolve into a shouting match during a conversation around the issues of gun rights and gun control. The term one chooses to use is often associated with one’s political position, so I will …
