What Great Companies Know About Culture - Deidre H. Campbell - Harvard Business Review

Even in this unprecedented business environment, great leaders know they should invest in their people. Those companies who are committed to a strong workplace culture tend to perform well, and now they are featured prominently in a new ranking recently released by Great Place to Work Institute. Among the top performers on the 2011 World's Best Multinational Companies list are culturally-strong technology companies such as Microsoft, NetApp, SAS, and Google. But is there a direct correlation between employee investment and the balance sheet? As Prof. James L. Heskett wrote in his latest book The Culture Cycle, effective culture can account for 20-30 percent of the differential in corporate performance when compared with "culturally unremarkable" competitors.

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Watch as a young Steve Jobs brainstorms with the NeXT team in 1985....

What is quite extraoridnary about these videos is that Jobs saw the Apple computer as a way of revolutionising higher education. The sad reflection as you will see here is that Apple the company revolutionised the computer, music and telecommunications but failed to move the most important contemporary civilising industry - education!!

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The Global Innovation 1000: Why Culture Is Key - Booz and Company Annual Study

Booz & Company’s annual study shows that spending more on R&D won’t drive results. The most crucial factors are strategic alignment and a culture that supports innovation.

Download and read the whole report here.

Review of Creativity From Constraints: The Psychology Of Breakthrough by Patricia D. Stokes

Here is a review of Creativity from Contraints: The Psychology of Breakthrough by Patricia Stokes. Stokes is a former advertising graphic artist who became a psychologist following her desire to understand creative behaviour as she had observed it in her profession. In summary, Stokes proposes there are four main constraints to creativity - domain, cognition,variability, talent - and it is how come to understand and articulate these constraints in context that will enable the kind of creative behaviours reuired to  obtain decision making breakthroughs that can be considered creative as opposed to more of the same.   

Preparing your organization for growth - McKinsey Quarterly

Companies that address their organizational weaknesses as they implement growth strategies give themselves an advantage.

Most senior managers pay close attention to the strategic side of growth—the “wheres,” “whens,” and
“hows.” Yet many underestimate the importance of organizational factors in translating a growth strategy into reality. This oversight can dampen a company’s growth plans: organizational processes and
structures that are well suited to today’s challenges may well buckle under the strain of new demands or
make it impossible to meet them. Likewise, key employees may lack the skills needed to cope with the additional complexity that growth brings. By reviewing the experiences of three organizations that faced the stresses imposed by new growth initiatives, this article seeks to illustrate such “pain points” and
suggests some approaches for coping with them.

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See how the Management Innovation Index supports and assists the premise of this article