Resources: Ch. 8 and 9 of Management and Case Study, Ch. 8 p. 257: IDEO's Culture Reinforces Helping Behavior
Prepare a 7- to 10-slide Microsoft® PowerPoint®, Prezi, or Microsoft® Sway® presentation supporting the following scenario relative to the IDEO case description in Ch. 8 of Management.
You have studied the organizational culture in place at IDEO and are making a presentation about this company to your company's top management team.
Describe the organizational culture at IDEO.
Analyze techniques used by IDEO to embed organizational culture.
Identify the organizational structure used by your organization/company. Make a recommendation as to whether you think the IDEO culture could be successfully implemented at your company.
Recommend mechanisms your company would need to employ should management decide to implement a culture change in line with the IDEO culture.
Include speaker notes for bulk of communication. Slides should contain headlines, graphics, and bullets.
Include an introduction and conclusion slide, as well as a reference slide.
The Surprising Omissions
These keys to collaborative help at IDEO may seem uncontroversial. But note what isn't part of the equation: some of corporate leadership's favorite talent-management levers.
The firm seems not to rely on fancy collaborative software tools or other technologies (although e-mail and videoconferencing are used frequently). Most pointedly, financial incentives don't play a prominent role in promoting the culture of help.
To be sure, executives have help in mind when evaluating job candidates. Brown wrote about this recently: "During job interviews, I listen for a couple things. When people repeatedly say 'I,' not 'we,' when recounting their accomplishments, I get suspicious. But if they're generous with giving credit and talk about how someone else was instrumental in their progress, I know that they give help as well as receive it."
Helpfulness is considered in promotions as well. It is a value that everyone in a senior position at IDEO is expected to model. But on a daily basis, the incentive to help comes from the simple gratitude it produces and the recognition of its worth.
This apparent joy in collaborative helping speaks to a larger reality of IDEO's culture: It is not about cutthroat competition. Many organizations discourage helping, at least implicitly, because it is seen as incompatible with individual responsibility for productivity.
Some have cultures that actually promote competition among peers, so aiding a colleague seems self-defeating. IDEO's message is that the thing to beat is the best work you could have done without help-and that when the firm produces the best work possible for clients, all its employees do better.
FOR DISCUSSION
1. Using the competing values framework as a point of reference, how would you describe the current organizational culture at IDEO? Provide examples to support your conclusions.
2. What type of culture is desired by Tim Brown to meet his goals? Does the company have this type of culture? Discuss.
3. Which of the 12 ways to embed organizational culture has IDEO used to create its current culture? Provide examples to support your conclusions.
4. Does Tim Brown want to create more of a mechanistic or organic organization? Explain the rationale for his preference.
5. What is the most important lesson from this case? Discuss.
Source: Excerpted from T. Amabile, C. M. Fisher, and J. Pillemer, "IDEO's Culture of Helping," Harvard Business Review, January- February 2014, pp. 55-61.
Attachment:- Management in Action.rar