Last week I posted thread that outlined some of the different types of corporate culture and started the process of looking into how corporate culture influences project outcomes. In this week's post we'll look at where cultures come from.
Part of the reason corporate culture is so poorly understood is because few organizations appreciate how cultures form. Cultures are invisible and they are hard to define. They develop out of ongoing interactions rather than a single moment in time and ...
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Author: admin
Corporate Culture – Part 1
Culture is a powerful force in any human system. It establishes the norms of behavior and acts as a reference point for the expectations we have of each other and ourselves. While we are all used to the idea of culture in our public societies (cultures driven by national identity, religious affiliation, generational groups and /or fashion), culture in the workplace gets less attention. While the phase "corporate culture" is banded around, few organizations really have a grasp of what it is, how ...
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Avon Products
The following entry is a record in the “Catalogue of Catastrophe” - a list of failed or troubled projects from around the world.
Avon Products - Canada
Project type : Product sales and ordering system
Project name : The "Promise" project
Date : Dec 2013 Cost : $100 to $125M
Synopsis :
Ding-dong - Avon calling. According to reports, a significant number of the Avon sales team in Canada will no longer be pressing any doorbells. One of the world's most established direct sales compan...
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Strategic Misrepresentation
As a timely follow up to the excellent set of posts about cognitive biases written by guest writer Paul Gibbons, the UK's National Audit Office (NAO) has just published a report that illustrates how the “optimism bias” and other dysfunctions can distort key investment decisions.
The decision to proceed with a project and decisions about how to approach it, are some of the most challenging needing to be made. These decisions are among the first to be made and occur at a point in time at which ...
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Cognitive biases and leading change – Part 3
In parts 1 and 2 of this series we have looked at the affect cognitive bias have on our view of the past and the present. In this third and final part we'll be looking at how such biases effect our view of the future.
Physicist Niels Bohr (a contemporary and collaborator of Einstein) said “prediction is difficult, especially about the future”. If humans are biased in our views of the past and present, our views of the future are even more fraught. We are caught between the Scylla of ho...
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Cognitive biases and leading change – Part 2
Last week we described the sunk cost and the ostrich biases and how they distorted the way change decision makers view the past. Other biases affect our view of the present. These present-based biases can be further split into problem definition, and solution finding.
Problems in problem definition
“If I had only one hour to save the world, I would spend fifty-five minutes defining the problem, and only five minutes finding the solution.” (Einstein)
The way problems are stated is called th...
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Cognitive biases and leading change – Part 1
Humans make big thinking mistakes in predictable ways. Collectively these errors are called ‘cognitive biases’. Business leaders sometimes make billion dollar decisions, and neither their businesses nor wider society can afford ‘hardware glitches’ on that scale. This three-part series on cognitive biases and leadership starts with how cognitive biases systematically distort our view of the past and how that affects today’s decisions.
In 2001, I was called into British Airways because they...
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Healthcare.gov
The following entry is a record in the “Catalogue of Catastrophe” - a list of failed or troubled projects from around the world.
Department of Health and Human Services - USA
Project type : e-Commerce marketplace
Project name : The Affordable Care Act
Date : Oct 2013 Cost : Unknown
Synopsis :
When the President of the United States has to address the issue in front of the whole nation, you know you’ve created a serious mess. The Affordable Care act of 2010 is President Obama’s sig...
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British Broadcasting Corporation
The following entry is a record in the “Catalogue of Catastrophe” - a list of failed or troubled projects from around the world.
British Broadcasting Corporation - UK
Project type : Digital archive
Project name : The Digital Media Initiative
Date : May 2013 Cost : £100M
Synopsis :
Having started operations in 1922, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) is one of the world's oldest and most respected media production and broadcasting organizations. Covering both entertainment ...
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J.C. Penny
The following entry is a record in the “Catalogue of Catastrophe” - a list of failed or troubled projects from around the world.
J. C. Penny Company Inc - USA
Project type : Nationwide merchandise pricing strategy
Project name : Fair and square
Date : Nov 2011 - May 2013 Cost : Contributor to $1B loss
Synopsis :
Know thy customer is the marketer's prime directive. Understand your stakeholder's is the Project Manager's corollary. J.C. Penny is a national level department store chain in the U...
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