Jamie Notter Blog
Tell Everyone Why We Do It This Way
All groups have norms--expectations about how the group does things. For formalized teams or Boards or Committees, once the group has been in existence for a while, the group norms become unspoken. Everyone knows them or can observe them fairly easily and learn to...
People at the Top: Make Your Choice on Culture
Having spent a fair amount of time over the last few months with CEOs in organizations with amazing cultures, I've been thinking about the role of the CEO. I've written about this before. It sort of bugs me that the CEOs have so much sway over culture, but they do....
Conversation with Sitrion CEO about Culture
After my keynote last year for Sitrion's client conference, I sat down with Daniel Kraft, their super-smart CEO, and chatted about culture and human organizations. Check it out; it's about 6 minutes long (if you can't see the video below, then click here to view it):
Cracking the Culture Code: Blogging
This is a guest post from Eric Lanke, the CEO of the National Fluid Power Association. This is the fifth in a series of posts he’s writing about how he, as a CEO, is building and sustaining an intentional culture in his organization, a national trade association. His...
Understanding Your Own Culture
When you are interviewing people for an open position at your organization, and you ask the candidate if they have any questions for you, I'll bet that more often than not you get something along the lines of "So what is the culture like here?" And when you give them...
The Importance of Community
"Community" is a big word in my circles, particularly in this day and age of online communities. There seem to be a lot of people in organizations who fret about their need to "build" community for their members or customers, and for large companies this extends to...
How to Make Firing People Easier
Note that the title says "easier," not "easy." It's rarely easy to fire people. In most cases the person that needs to go is a good person, and probably does a decent job--just not the job you need right now in this particular context. And most of us don't feel good...
Focus on the Corporate Middle Class (Friday Quote)
This week's Friday quote comes from The Alliance, a book written by Reid Hoffman, a co-founder of LinkedIn (and Ben Casnocha and Chris Yeh). The book builds off of an HBR article that I wrote about last year, where Hoffman talks about creating "Tours of Duty" for...
Applying the Digital Mindset Internally
One of the hallmarks of technology and software design is the focus on user and user experience. As I pointed out last month, organizations typically do not consider their internal users (i.e., employees) when they design the organization and its culture, but they...