Leader's Beacon

We live in the three-pound universe between our ears, but it’s surprising how little most people know about themselves. How we see the world develops from our earliest years as our innate, inborn tendencies (our temperament) interact with our experiences and the environment to build underlying patterns of thinking, emotions, and other characteristics that become [...]

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Studies have shown that over 85% of the root causes of organizational performance problems are in the structures, systems, and culture within which work-groups are embedded. Structures and systems are either consciously defined with purpose and intent around a strategic direction as an Intended Culture, or they emerge naturally from the patterns-of-interaction of the personalities [...]

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Michael Hammer states that, “Most companies today – no matter what business they are in, how technologically sophisticated their product or service, or what their national origin – can trace their work styles and organizational roots back to the prototypical pin factory that Adam Smith described in The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776.” This [...]

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A common perception is that cultural change has to start at the very top of an organization. But studies and field experience have shown that culture change can begin with the sub-culture of a work-group where a manager who is one or two levels down from senior management decides to become an Island of Excellence® [...]

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Is your organization unable to change in the face of forces and threats from the business environment? Are you struggling against overly complex systems that frustrate and undermine your attempts to create positive change? Is your organization activity focused, rather than outcome focused? Does vital business information get filtered, altered, or stopped as it moves [...]

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I was once on a scuba diving trip to the Great Barrier Reef off the coast of Australia, and one of the dive masters who knew a lot about marine life would always say, “The more you know, the more you see.” With over 1,500 species of fish, 1,000 species of mollusks and crustaceans, and [...]

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In a world of increasing stakeholder expectations and decreasing resources, aggressive cost cutting programs have run their course. Where do you turn next? Increasing a company’s revenues and gross margins, and knowing where (and how) to reduce costs without negatively impacting customer satisfaction, employee productivity and morale, or business processes that are working effectively requires [...]

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Perhaps the single most important part of evaluating an organization’s culture is gaining a clear understanding of the nature, viability, and sustainability of its revenue and funding streams, and the expectations and pressures that are exerted on the organization by customers, competitors, suppliers, regulators, taxpayers, and other forces in the external environment. This article discusses [...]

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Prior to the 20th Century, millions of people died from diseases that could have been easily cured by an antibiotic like penicillin. For years, the world’s leading bacteriologists had searched for the missing piece to this medical puzzle. Many times they were looking right at it. But they always “saw” the penicillin mold as a [...]

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The most powerful force in creating (or maintaining) organizational culture in work-groups is the personality and philosophy of life of the manager who leads the work-group. Traditional approaches to managing conflict in work-groups tend to view all members of a work-group as “equal,” but the influence of the work-group manager must be more heavily weighted [...]

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Organizational culture and theoretical entities like electrons have some important things in common. First, the actual entities themselves are in principle invisible to the naked eye so while their “reality” has often been debated and doubted, the affects they have on things that can be seen and measured are very, very real – only a [...]

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Stephen was the manager of a work-group in a company where he was held strictly accountable for the milestones, deliverables, and the overall performance of his work-group. But Stephen constantly struggled with destructive conflict between two individuals (Sal and Christy) who had radically different approaches to problem-solving on key projects that had high corporate visibility [...]

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While most people think of organizational culture in broad, sociological terms, field experience has shown that one of the fundamental building blocks of organizational culture is patterns-of-interaction between small-groups of 2s, 3s, and 4s. Most managers in an organization know that effectively leading a work-group takes an enormous amount of time and energy because they [...]

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Trust is the foundation of all human interactions, and the cornerstone upon which high-performing organizational cultures are built. The Organizational Trust Index™ was developed by the Breckenridge Institute® as a method for measuring the level of trust in an organization and the degree to which an organization’s culture is either motivated by trust or driven [...]

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The purpose of culture (any culture) is to teach people how to “see” the world. More specifically, organizational culture is created, reinforced, promulgated, and maintained through the powerful See-Do-Get Process® where managers and staff members are “taught” how to see themselves, other people, and the world around them. For example, a customer (Curt) walks into [...]

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Studies have shown that the forces, trends, and pace of the business environment have the single greatest influence on shaping organizational culture. But there are even more global forces affecting the business environment in subtle, but profound ways that define how organizations must interact with customers and respond to competitors in order to achieve sustained [...]

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