Bertrand Duperrin's Library tagged meaning → View Popular, Search in Google

Mar

2012

How leaders kill meaning at work

"Senior executives routinely undermine creativity, productivity, and commitment by damaging the inner work lives of their employees in four avoidable ways."

www.mckinseyquarterly.com/...ders_kill_meaning_at_work_2910

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management leadership meaning attention

Beyond affecting the well-being of employees, inner work life affects the bottom line.² People are more creative, productive, committed, and collegial in their jobs when they have positive inner work lives. But it’s not just any sort of progress in work that matters. The first, and fundamental, requirement is that the work be meaningful to the people doing it.
we argue that managers at all levels routinely—and unwittingly—undermine the meaningfulness of work for their direct subordinates through everyday words and actions
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- Most likely, your company aspires to greatness, articulating a high purpose for the organization in its corporate mission statement. But are you inadvertently signaling the opposite through your words and actions?
- In practice, we see too many top managers start and abandon initiatives so frequently that they appear to display a kind of attention deficit disorder (ADD) when it comes to strategy and tactics. They don’t allow sufficient time to discover whether initiatives are working, and they communicate insufficient rationales to their employees when they make strategic shifts.
- Our research found that many executives who think everything is going smoothly in the everyday workings of their organizations are blithely unaware that they preside over their own corporate version of the Keystone Kops. Some contribute to the farce through their actions, others by failing to act. At Karpenter, for example, top managers set up overly complex matrix reporting structures, repeatedly failed to hold support functions (such as purchasing and sales) accountable for coordinated action, and displayed a chronic indecisiveness that bred rushed analyses.
- At some companies, however, such statements are grandiose, containing little relevance or meaning for people in the trenches. They can be so extreme as to seem unattainable and so vague as to seem empty. The result is a meaning vacuum. Cynicism rises and drive plummets. Although we saw this trap clearly in only one of the seven companies we studied, we think it is sufficiently seductive and dangerous to warrant consideration.

Apr

2011

We don't need no stinkin' badges: How to re-invent reality without gamification

www.slideshare.net/...t-reality-without-gamification

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gamification rewards games relationship meaning accomplishment emotions

May

2010

A rose (or community manager) by any other name

"In my opinion, this is a question of tripartite semiotics. The Community Manager debate concerns three linguistic issues:

· the semantic question: what is the relation between the words community and manager and the concepts they denote? In what way does the word signify the meaning, and is that relationship standardized or generally accepted?

· the syntactic question: what is the relation between these two terms? How is the meaning affected by putting them together? In what way do these terms interact with the formal language structures in which they are used?

· the pragmatic question: what is the relationship between the words and the people who use them? What impact does the term Community Manager have when it is used within different communities and contexts?"

snarkyoptimist.blogspot.com/...nity-manager-by-any-other.html

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communitymanagement semiotics syntactic meaning

This is what is happening with Community Managers. Yes, manager has a hierarchical connotation. But increasingly, Community Manager is not understood as community + manager. It is becoming a signifying unit, a term or tag associated with corresponding ideas, of its own.
I grant that this is a gradual process and that Community Manager will remain an uncomfortable term for some people. And if you would rather call these positive agents Community Enablers or Community Leaders or Community Hedgehogs, that is your decision

Sep

2008

Umair Haque How to Build a Next-Gen Business Now

The macro crisis tells us that it's time to get serious about what we've been discussing for the last few months: building a better kind of business. So here's a five-step construction kit for tomorrow's revolutionaries.

discussionleader.hbsp.com/...ld_a_nextgen_business_now.html

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crisis business organization management meaning sense strategy

The macro crisis tells us that it's time to get serious about what we've been discussing for the last few months: building a better kind of business. So here's a five-step construction kit for tomorrow's revolutionaries.
That's the third, simplest, and most fundamental step in building next-generation businesses: understanding that next-generation businesses are built on new DNA, or new ways to organize and manage economic activities.
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- Think that sounds like science fiction? Think again. Here are just a few of the most radical new organizational and management techniques today's revolutionaries are already utilizing: open-source production, peer production, viral distribution, radical experimentation, connected consumption, and co-creation.
- Yet, listing all of those components is just a start - and a poor one, because it's just the sterile, often meaningless language of economics. The fifth, final, and most difficult step in building next-generation businesses is this: we have to put the meaning back into business.
  
  For too long, business has been meaningless: a passionless, soul-crushing game of ripping the next guy's head off, to attain a short-lived competitive advantage - often simply balanced out by someone else's disadvantage - in order to score points on an illusory scoreboard of "shareholder value creation".
- This final step - rediscovering meaning in the work we do - isn't just the most difficult to come to grips with. It's also the most critical - because though the other steps are necessary, they're not sufficient. Without a deeply felt - and a powerfully lived - sense of meaning, every business will devolve to what the investment banks became: machines engineered with relentless precision to destroy long-run value, often implosively so.