Voices of Value Mentors

Launch of M&A Cultural Affinity Inventory

2011-11-02T12:03:00.000-07:00

Values Mentors & the Minessence Group, in collaboration with the SaintOnge Alliance have successful launched their M & A Cultural Affinity Inventory. The VM-CAI deploys proprietary "ValScan" technology to identify the values existing between merger partners based on a content analysis of cultural documents such as senior leadership speeches, blogs, websites, mission/vision statements, annual reports, etc. This data is integrated with individual and organizational values empirically measured and profiled by the Minessence Group/Value Mentors Executive Values Inventory to provide an index of cultural affinity.

MIT Selects Joi Ito as the new Director of Its Media Lab

2011-04-25T18:59:00.000-07:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/26/science/26lab.html?src=tptw

UC Digital Media Learning Program Leadership Development Program

2011-03-31T19:33:00.000-07:00

I began work on the UC Digital Media Learning Lab Leadership Development project this week. This project is led by Mimi Ito and is sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation's program in Digital Media & Learning.

When Power Makes Others Speechless: The Negative Impact of Leader Power on Team Performance

2011-03-03T12:47:00.000-08:00

Authors: Leigh Plunkett Tost, Francesca Gino, and Richard P. Larrick

Abstract

We examine the impact of subjective power on leadership behavior and demonstrate that the psychological effect of power on leaders spills over to impact team effectiveness. Specifically, drawing from the approach/inhibition theory of power, power-devaluation theory, and organizational research on the antecedents of employee voice, we argue that a leader's experience of heightened power produces verbal dominance, which reduces perceptions of leader openness and team open communication. Consequently, there is a negative effect of leader power on team performance. Three studies find consistent support for this argument. The implications for theory and practice are discussed.

Download the paper: http://www.hbs.edu/research/pdf/11-087.pdf

"Giving Voice to Values: How To Speak Your Mind When You Know What's Right"

2011-01-16T21:35:00.000-08:00

Check out this important new book by Mary Gentile.
http://www.marycgentile.com/

Mary experienced the AVI and Values Mentoring process in March, 2009 and credits the work as being helpful at an important moment in her journey.

How can you effectively stand up for your values when pressured by your boss, colleagues, customers, or shareholders to do the opposite?

"Educator Mary Gentile empowers business leaders with the skills to voice and act on their values, and align their professional path with their principles. Her book, Giving Voice to Values, is inspired by a curriculum Gentile launched at the Aspen Institute with Yale School of Management, now housed at Babson College, with pilot programs in over 100 schools and organizations on five continents.

Challenging the assumptions about business ethics at companies and business schools, she argues that often the issue isn’t distinguishing what is right or wrong, but knowing how to act on your values despite opposing pressure. Drawing on actual business experiences as well as social science research, Gentile offers advice, practical exercises, and scripts for handling a wide range of ethical dilemmas. Published by Yale University Press, Giving Voice to Values is an engaging, innovative, and useful guide that is essential reading for anyone in business"

Margaret Wheatley on Self-Organizing Organizations

2011-01-08T15:54:00.000-08:00

"How do we create organizations that stay alive? How do we create organizations that don't suffocate us with their imperatives for control and compliance? The answer is straight-forward. We need to trust that we are self-organizing and we need to create the conditions in which self-organization can flourish."

Margaret J. Wheatley
Author of Leadership
& the New Science

The Big Idea: Creating Shared Value & Worldviews

2011-01-08T15:41:00.000-08:00

I believe that the way we crate shared values is by consciously understanding and applying a values framework that includes but moves beyond a purely transactional worldview towards a Collaborative and Symbiotic worldview.
The Big Idea: Creating Shared Value - Harvard Business Review
http://hbr.org/2011/01/the-big-idea-creating-shared-value/es

A great post by Umair Haque: "The Shape of the Meaning Organization"

2011-01-06T19:59:00.000-08:00

The Shape of the Meaning Organization
from Umair Haque by Umair Haque
http://blogs.hbr.org/haque/2011/01/the_shape_of_the_meaning_organ.html

New Year's resolutions: what are they really about? I'd say that they're about habits — and especially about breaking the less than beneficial ones. So here's a thought. As I've argued here and in my book (officially published today!), it's the behavior of industrial age institutions — corporations, banks, governments — that's the invisible fist of this great crisis. Instead of creating enduring, authentic value for people, they're consistently, systematically, one might say habitually extracting wealth from them — and the result is the game of musical chairs writ large that is this crisis.

What are the habits of this whirling machine? Roughly, I'd suggest that they're strategy, marketing, finance, and the rest of the drear, dismal, passionless stuff that makes most of us snooze through meetings and dread the arrival of Monday morning, dilberting our joint prosperity, perpetually disappointing our ever-more apathetic customers, and gleefully embezzling from the future.

I'd suggest that the economic historians of the 23rd century are going to look back on the economies, markets, and organizations of the 20th the way we look back on the debtors' prisons, indentured servitude, and mercantile colonialism of the 18th. "How," I bet they'll ask themselves, "could they spend their time, energy, and resources — their very lives — in pursuit of the trivial and the inconsequential, the pedestrian and the pointless, the predatory and the predictable? Especially when confronted by a Great Stagnation, why didn't they rethink their suffocatingly, stultifyingly self-destructive habits?"

It's well past time to begin imagining an organization of a radically different kind — one that takes a quantum leap beyond strategy, marketing, and finance into a novel galaxy of unexplored, untapped economic possibilities.

Here's what I think that organization — call it the Meaning Organization — might look it. It's a nod to — but a step beyond — Peter Senge's learning organization. It's built not just to learn (and then do "business") but, more deeply, to redraw the boundaries of prosperity, by doing meaningful stuff that matters the most.

First, its brain wouldn't be the strategy group, but the wisdom group. The strategy group's job is to ensure that the organization is maximizing its payoffs, thus creating value for shareholders — so industrial age, so selfish, so myopic, so boring. The reason most organizations can't create thick, authentic (or shared) value is because they're not really interested in it: you can't argue that you're taking it seriously when the only person thinking about it is shunted off to some "CSR" ghetto that reports to three middle managers, whose harried, rumpled boss reports to the baby-faced junior associate intern of the strategy group — whose only job is to put near-term profit first. That's how the vast majority of organizations still, literally, work — and until it isn't, well, they simply won't be able to compete in 21st century terms.

Hence, the wisdom group. The wisdom group's job would be, first and foremost, to ensure that the organization is creating value that's enjoyed by all its key stakeholders — people, nature, the future, society. The group's responsibilities would begin with measuring, monitoring, and managing that value — but end up with shepherding, guiding, and nurturing it. The wisdom group would make sure the company was doing stuff that matters to our great-great-great-grandkids, that ennobles us, that develops our better selves, and that honors the firm's bigger purpose.

And the wisdom group's lifeblood wouldn't be in the hands of a finance team — but in the hands of what you might call a significance team. Because it's concerned with thick value, shared among and between all of an organization's stakeholders, the next-generation organization's got to think bigger — and better — than purely debt and equity, and what they're worth to today's myopic investors.

Instead, companies are going to have to get lethally serious about having an enduring, meaningful, resonant, multiplying, positive, proliferating set of impacts — of all types, whether social, human, intellectual, spiritual, creative, or relational. An isolated notion of "profit" is obsolete: it's an arid industrial-age conception of a currency-focused construct that's built to trivialize everything but what a firm owes its "owners" (its employees, society, community, environment, the future, even its own bigger purpose can all go to blazes). In the 21st century we're discovering the hard way just how threadbare and barren a prosperity that tired, lame, stale idea led to. Hence, the significance team, concerned foremost with creating and delivering benefits that matter in human terms. Outcomes, not income — that's the difference between industrial age "finance" and the nascent art of significance.

In the Meaning Organization, the nerve center wouldn't be marketing — but what you might call humanizing. In too many boardrooms, marketroids are minions, flunkies, and sidekicks, yes-men who refuse to stand up to the CEO, CFO, or board and say "No!! In the long-run, it's really not a good idea for us to push a lowest-common-denominator product that sucks." Heck, let's admit it — when they're not toadying up to the CEO and board, telling 'em exactly what they want to hear, most of the time, it's marketing that gleefully dreams such stuff up.

Hence, marketing's role has become simply to find slightly cleverer ways to convince "consumers" to buy more, more, more of the industrial age's rapidly depreciating, mass-produced, joyless, drab clutter. By contrast, "humanizing" is about helping people stop mutely, rotely (over)consuming, and start enjoying, improving, bettering; to help them maximize the authentic, long-run value they realize from a product or service; and to stop organizations from hard-selling the overconsumption of toxic, socially and personally self-destructive junk. Where marketing's about making markets, humanizing's about helping people blossom, flourish, and grow.

Hopelessly naïve, thoroughly idealistic, offensively simple-minded? Sure — I'll be the first to admit that the habits I've discussed with you here are far from the only ones, or even the "best" ones.

They're just a starting point — and that's the real point: the habits we live and breathe (the tired, toxic practices known as marketing, strategy, finance, and more) are about as useful when it comes to igniting the spark of authentic, enduring prosperity as a Hummer the size of Krakatoa is to the atmosphere.

And if you're thinking about changing your habits this year, perhaps this isn't a bad place to begin.

A Great Interview with Margaret Wheatley

2011-01-02T20:25:00.000-08:00

http://www.scottlondon.com/interviews/wheatley.html

Anatomy is destiny. Study: Conservatives have larger ‘fear center’ in brain

2010-12-30T20:54:00.000-08:00

Political opinions are considered choices, and in Western democracies the right to choose one's opinions -- freedom of conscience -- is considered sacrosanct.

But recent studies suggest that our brains and genes may be a major determining factor in the views we hold.

http://www.rawstory.com/

New Value Mentors Network Partners

2010-12-30T20:27:00.000-08:00

I'm pleased to announce the addition of eight new Value Mentors Network Partners. This distinguished group includes: Joi Ito (Chairman, Creative Commons); Timothy Karsten (Principal, TDKA Group); Kristin Keffeler (Principal,Kinetic Enterprise); Abby Raphel (Executive Director The Redwoods Initiative); Jeffrey Walker (Chairman, Millenium Promise); John A Warnick Esq:(Founder & Director, Purposeful Planning Institute); Matt Wesley (Principal, The Wesley Group) & Ray Wilson (Principal, R.O. Wilson & Company)

Minessence eZine 45 has been published: "The Top Priority Values in Each of the Eight Clusters of Values"

2010-12-30T20:22:00.000-08:00

http://www.minessence.net/eZine/view.aspx?issue=45

Thanks to Paul Chippendale for generating this profile from the Minessence data base.It will definitely be of use in our development of a new assessment tool.

Article by my colleague, Paul Chippendale: When Your Worldview Changes Your Priority Values Change

2010-12-30T20:17:00.000-08:00

From the Online Values Journal

http://valuesjournal.com/?p=758

Interview with Joichi Ito: a Value Mentors Network Partner

2010-12-30T20:12:00.000-08:00

Interview in the Guardian (UK)from December 5 with Joichi Ito, noted Internet entrepeneur, CEO of Creative Common on promoting copyright licenses that support a Collaborative Worldview & the signature values of innovation and collaboration.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/dec/05/my-bright-idea-joi-ito

The Neuroeconomics of Trust

2010-12-30T20:08:00.000-08:00

Oxytocine promotes feelings of safety, trust, reciprocity, generosity & collaboration.

http://www.miller-mccune.com/business-economics/the-best-fiscal-stimulus-trust-20005/

Breaking the Silence

2008-04-15T14:24:00.000-07:00

This is a very insightful NY Times article on inheritance, values & the meaning of wealth. It strongly suggests that the current emerging conversation around values in investment and philanthropy is timely and relevant.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/18/business/businessspecial3/18family.html?_r=1&ref=businessspecial3&oref=slogin#

Here is a representative quote:

Patricia Angus, principal of wealth advisory services at Shelterwood Financial Services in New York, said that many of her clients were changing how they define wealth. “The definition is broadening to include not just financial capital but human, social and intellectual capital,” Ms. Angus said. “Professionals used to think it was just, “How do I transfer my financial assets at the lowest tax costs? Now people are asking, What is the purpose and meaning of what I’m doing here, and how do I pass those down? It’s not about death. It’s about an experience in life, an opportunity to talk as a family about purpose and values that might not otherwise come up. For people who just write a document and put it in a drawer to be opened on their death, I don’t see that opportunity coming up.”

This article is available as a NYT reprint

Your Company's Face and Your Company's Voice

2008-04-15T13:55:00.000-07:00

Well, here goes my first Blog ever, inspired by my participation in a very informative discussion on "De-mystifying the Blogosphere" sponsored my colleague Greg Berry of nuanceintelligence.com The discussion was led by Bill French of MyST Technology Partners.

Here is Bill French's quote which inspired me:

"Your website is the face of your company. Your Blog is its voice."