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The Associate Editors listing for Volume 9 of The International Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Change Management is now available.
Monthly Archive for March, 2010
Kellogg Insight
“We are unable to comment on this tragic accident until all the facts are known,” read a statement Toyota issued in response to the accident that killed off-duty California Highway Patrol officer Mark Saylor. The crash of Saylor’s dealer-loaned Lexus would touch off a series of investigations and product recalls that would undermine the storied Japanese automaker’s reputation for safety and quality.
“No comment” is a typical response for a company in Toyota’s position. But where executives see “no comment” as a safe and middle-of-the-road statement, the public hears a company trying to deny guilt and shirk responsibility. In fact, there may be little discernable difference in public reaction between “no comment” and a defensive approach to a crisis, according to new research by Adam Galinsky, professor of management and organizations, and Daniel Diermeier, professor of managerial economics and decision sciences, both at the Kellogg School of Management. Galinsky and Diermeier found that companies are perceived positively when they respond to crises in engaged and empathetic ways. Companies that offer “no comment” or react defensively not only may be harming their brand, they could be driving consumers away from their products in ways they never imagined.
“There can be a spillover from one side to another—a different part of the business. That means, for example, that a crisis that may be a sexual harassment case may have consequences for how a corporate logo is evaluated,” Diermeier says. In their experiments, Galinsky, Diermeier, and their colleagues also noticed that people rate their experiences with a product—bottled water in one case—lower and consume less of it when a company involved in a crisis does not respond in an engaging and empathetic way.
From Joshua Brustein in the New York Times blog Bits:
A service released earlier this week by Teneros, an online communication services company, makes it much easier for companies to keep tabs on their employees’ social networking activities.
The software, called Social Sentry, will automatically monitor Facebook and Twitteraccounts for between $2 and $8 an employee, depending on the size of the company and the level of activity being monitored.
…
Social Sentry draws only on publicly posted information on Facebook and Twitter; the company plans to add YouTube, MySpace and LinkedIn by this summer. The company is marketing the product as a way to watch for the release of confidential or embarrassing information and to measure how much time employees are spending on social media during work hours.
From Chris Cameron at readwriteweb.com:
We have talked about the power of utilizing social networks for businesses before in our Weekend Reading series with books like The Facebook Era, by Clara Shih and Crush It!, by Gary Vaynerchuk, and this week we’ve got another book under a similar vein. Published just last month, Social Networking for Businesses: Choosing the Right Tools and Resources to Fit Your Needs, by Rawn Shah is a guide for companies looking to take advantage of the collaborative communities of social networks to improve their business.
Author Rawn Shah has plenty of experience in this very subject as he is the Best Practices Lead on the Social Software Adoption Team at IBM. In Social Networking for Businesses, Shah breaks down the essentials and methods of modeling social experiences for businesses to get the most out of their users and customers. One of the most important factors to the success of social business experiences is the leadership of those experiences, says Shah, who points to the success of blogs and Wikipedia as examples.
The latest issue of The International Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Change Management includes:
- Management Accounting Knowledge, Culture, and Change in Today’s Global Music Industry by Peter S. Goodrich, Julia M. Camp and Patrick Kelly.
- Factors Affecting the Position of Multinational versus Domestic Companies: A Case Study Analysis by Slawomir Wycislak.
- Fine-Grained Access to Online Content for Virtual Communities by Kenneth Baclawski, Viral Gupta, Tejas Parikh, Peter Yim and Jonathan Cheyer.
- Making “Green” Organizations Multicultural: Debunking the Myths About People of Color by Jim Bonilla.
- Managing Organizational Portal Services by Peter Géczy, Noriaki Izumi, Shotaro Akaho and Kôiti Hasida.
- Acculturation in Cross-Border Acquisitions: A Theoretical Framework for Dissecting the Process by Robin Hurst and David Szabla.
- The Role of the Sponsor in Business Change by Sharm Manwani.
From the International Center for Research on Women:
In a new, groundbreaking study, International Center for Research on Women examines how cutting-edge innovations can transform women’s lives. The ICRW report analyzes how a variety of innovations that used technology, changed social norms and strengthened economic vitality helped women.
Researchers identified seven core approaches – or levers – needed for any innovation to create meaningful change for women.
They include:
- Creating strategic partnerships among governments, the private sector and civil society.
- Including women in the design and implementation of innovative ideas.
- Having committed support from governments as well as efforts at the grassroots level.
ICRW’s findings come at a critical moment.
Social, political and economic shifts globally are creating a perfect storm for innovations to benefit and potentially empower women. Take foot-pedaled water pumps. In sub-Saharan Africa, women in rural communities traditionally are responsible for collecting water to irrigate the crops that feed their families and that sell in markets. It can be a time- and labor-consuming effort.
The twelfth issue of Volume 9 of The International Journal of Knowledge, Culture and Change Management has now been published.
Volume 9, Number 12 includes:
- Factors Influencing Academic Capital of Women Academics by Hadrian G. Djajadikerta and Terri Trireksani.
- Constructing KM: The Constraints of a Narrative-Told by Rachel Jones.
- Celebrating Diversity in Organizations: An Analysis of Workplace Initiatives by Beatrice Gibbons.
- The Story of Lijjat: Women’s Entrepreneurship and Empowerment in India by Achinto Roy and Reshmi Lahiri-Roy.
- A Pathway to Women’s Empowerment in Tanzania: Capacity Building for Personal and Social Impact by Dorothy Ettling, Alison Buck and Paula Caffer.
- Increasing Political, Economic, and Social Impact of Indie Folk Music in an Era of Dynamic Global Technological Change by Peter Spang Goodrich and Nancy Rossiter.
- Analysis of the Relation between Change Perception and Demographic Factors (A Research in Turkish Hospital Sector) by Fatma Ayanoglu Sisman and H. Nilay Gemlik.
From Edward Tufte, as told to Jimmy Guterman in the MITSloan Management Review:
On the (Very, Very Bad) Design of Corporate Web Sites
The front page of a good news site will have 300 links on it. That’s great. And so the question is: How come your corporate Web site has only seven links on its opening screen, and the links are called “sharing our values,” “participation” and so on? No user has ever asked Google to show him all the Web sites about sharing your company’s values.
A corporate Web site should do what a good news Web site does. If you look at the really successful Web sites where there are millions of hits, especially nonfiction Web sites, the New York Times and Google News, they all have 300 links on the opening page. How come businesses don’t do that? How come the links are to “sharing,” “participating” and “our values”? That’s flabby design for flabby content. The models for presenting nonfiction should not be what your competitors are doing, but rather excellence in reporting nonfiction. And there are terrific examples out there for reporting nonfiction.
The kind of conformity toward flabbiness in corporate Web sites is astonishing, and they’re imitating each other in their content and design flabbiness. It’s silly. People are inherently distrustful of them. And yet most of those sites are, in fact, about reporting facts. But they get softened up by the marketing people. You get all these pressures that tend to normalize design, that tend to make it like other corporations and that make things intellectually flabby and visually flabby. They turn into pitches.
Training the Next Generation of Knowledge Workers: Readings for Effective Secondary Education & Workplace Learning Practices an edited collection by Jonathan H. Westover is now available from The Organisation imprint.
In today’s shifting global economy and the emergence of the technology and service-oriented knowledge organization, how do we train the rising generation of knowledge workers with the knowledge, skills, and the ability to perform and add value in a hyper-intensive competitive global marketplace?
What are the methods and strategies for effectively preparing the future knowledge worker generation? What needs to be done in our institutions of higher learning? What initiatives and methods need to be adopted by organizations for greater engaged learning and transference of knowledge to practical application in the workplace? These are just some of the pressing questions facing the organizations of today.
This edited collection provides a comprehensive introduction to organizational learning and explores the wide sweeping impacts for the modern workplace, presenting a wide range of cross-disciplinary research in an organized, clear, and accessible manner. It will be informative to management academics and instructors, while also instructing organizational managers, leaders, and human resource development professions of all types seeking to understand proven practices and methods to train the next generation of knowledge workers that will drive an enhanced competitive advantage in an increasingly competitive global economy.