If you haven’t heard of Marshall McLuhan, well you’re simply missing out on one of Canada’s most innovative minds. Derrick de Kerckhove, Director of the McLuhan Program of Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto since 1983 wrote McLuhan for Managers in 2003. Shamefully, I didn’t know about the book until this year, courtesy of Jon Husband. In the book, Derrick (and co-author Mark Federman) introduce the Laws of Media through a tetrad: Extend (what does the artefact enhance or intensify or make possible or accelerate) Obsolesce (what is pushed aside by the new organ) Retrieve (what older, previously obsolesced ground is brought back and inheres in the new form) Reverse (what is the reversal potential of the new form) Harold Jarche has written about the tetrads
Culture Archive
I really like what Peter Bregman has to say in his latest post entitled, “The Best Way To Change A Corporate Culture“. In essence, he states that it’s not only systems, packages, programs, etc. that might need to be changed (which I argue, they most definitely need to be at some point in time) rather it’s story telling that will be your first point of affecting cultural change. His theory is about peer pressure. By flooding the ecosystem of an organization with positive stories, you will undoubtedly create a groundswell of cultural change. My additional argument, however (in addition to the marriage of how culture, systems and structure bring us to the Work 2.0 panacea mantra) is that we need senior level champions who are
There are organizations in this world that ‘get it’, there are those that are figuring it out, and there are those that just can’t see the light. I’m referring to the tsunami of change concerning the way in which people expect to operate, not just inside the corporate walls, but as good ole human beings. You may argue that Gary Hamel and Thomas Malone were (or are) ahead of their time. In each of their revolutionary (and obviously evolutionary) books (The Future of Management and The Future of Work), the underlying principle is that in order to drive results, innovation, productivity and efficient use of time, the organization needs to become flat. Malone states ““As managers, we need to shift our thinking from command and