Marga Biller

11th Annual LILA Summit Keynote Speaker: Sandy Pentland

by Marga Biller
May 18, 2017

Dr. Alex “Sandy” Pentland directs MIT’s Human Dynamics Laboratory and the MIT Media Lab Entrepreneurship Program and co-leads the World Economic Forum Big Data and Personal Data initiatives. Pentland’s research focuses on social physics, big data and privacy. His research helps people better understand the “physics” of their social environment, and helps individuals, companies and communities to reinvent themselves to be safer, more productive, and more creative. Pentland shows that, in fact, humans respond much more powerfully to social incentives that involve rewarding others and strengthening the ties that bind than incentives that involve only their own economic self-interest. Sandy has...
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11th Annual LILA Summit Keynote Speaker: Gert Jan Hofstede

by Marga Biller
May 18, 2017

Dr. Gert Jan Hofstede is a Dutch population biologist and social scientist in information management and social simulation. Currently a professor at Wageningen University, Dr. Hofstede explores the interplay of the contrasting forces of culturalevolution, societal change and cultural stability. In exploring the generic dynamics of human social behavior, Dr. Hofstede contends that people are not unpredictable, but ill-understood. He uses simulation gaming and social simulation as methods that integrate knowledge from many fields to generate information that can be applied in all kinds of practical contexts. Much of his current work focuses on computational modelling of the social side of complex adaptive systems. This work links to a pioneering study of...
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11th Annual LILA Summit: Adaptive Cultures

by Marga Biller
May 18, 2017

“Culture” is often given the credit – or the blame – for whatever is going right or wrong in an organization. But what exactly is organizational culture and what is its relationship to organizational behavior? Do we drive culture or does it drive us? How can culture be changed, maintained, nurtured or leveraged to lead to the results that we seek? Join LILA Member CLOs, guest scholars, and our keynote speakers for a day of interactive presentations and small group discussions on the topic of Adaptive Cultures. The 11th Annual LILA Summit will take place on June 6th 2017 and...
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What We Learned About Unlearning To Learn

by Marga Biller
January 26, 2017

This brief represents the culmination of our year of exploring the theme of unlearning to learn together. Over the course of the year, we have explored how we can best define, understand, and foster unlearning. Unlearning is learning to think, behave, or perceive differently, when there are already beliefs, behaviors, or assumptions in place (that get in the way), at either the individual or the organizational level. It becomes important when individuals, groups, and whole organizations have to find ways to effectively support change, overwrite old habits, surface and supplant entrenched ways of thinking, and develop new ways of working...
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Bechtel Wins Chief Learning Officer Award for Second Consecutive Year

by Marga Biller
2 January 5, 2017

“Partnering with the business to develop a game-changing learning program that provides valuable skills to our employees, partners and customers, and essentially adding to the bottom line, is the ultimate goal of an organImage result for lucy dinwiddieization’s learning and development team,” said Lucy Dinwiddie, Bechtel’s chief learning officer. “To be honored with an award as significant as the CLO, demonstrates the collaboration and innovation of the Bechtel team and the commitment to our colleagues across the globe.”
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How To Kill Your Culture with Mary Jo Hatch

by Marga Biller
January 4, 2017

Mary Joe Hatch will share the research she conducted about "the top and middle managers’ experiences and understandings of how organizational identity and culture were entangled with transformational change as it unfolded over a 5-year period in Carlsberg Group. Combining ethnography and grounded theory methods with engaged scholarship, our work sits between research and practice, speaking directly to the experience of managers at the same time that it researches both the content and processes of organizational identity and culture. The study shows that engaging in processes of reflecting, questioning, and debating about their organization’s identity led middle managers and employees both to support and resist new organizational identity claims made by top management. Within these identity activation processes we found frequent references relating new identity claims to organizational culture.
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December 8 Member Call featuring Monica Worline

by Marga Biller
November 30, 2016

Monica’s scholarship is animated by one of the classic puzzles of organizing: as humans, we hold tremendous potential for capable action, but we are easily swayed into inaction by hierarchy, social norms, conformity, and other regularities of group life. Monica uses her writing, research, and teaching to ask how organizations can enliven the people who work in them, especially in the face of adversity. Monica will share her thinking about creating positive organizational cultures specifically through four frames roles, network ties, routines and values.
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Changing Organizational Culture is Hard! by Mats Alvesson

by Marga Biller
November 21, 2016

Based around a case-study, Mats shared the findings regarding the reality of organizational change. From planning and inception to project management and engagement, the explored the views and reactions of various stakeholders undergoing real life change processes. Drawing on theories of organizational culture, Mats helped us to understand how organizations can promote change without alienating the people needed to implement it.
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Understanding Culture by David Perkins

by Marga Biller
November 3, 2016

As Dave Perkins shared prior to his synthesis, this is not an attempt to summarize everything that the LILA community explored during the October 2016 gathering, rather it is a way a 64,000 view that might help advance our thinking on the topic. Defining Adaptive Cultures Individual cultural knowledge is largely tacit – we don’t know what we know (we just behave) Iceberg: like the being roughly 90% under water, not knowing like this is not just limited to culture, but to all fluent knowledge (example of grammar, used implicitly) The 10% of explicit knowledge is very important to...
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October 2016 Event Feedback

by Marga Biller
October 20, 2016

Day 1 Want well wellLearning round format seemed generative, smaller groups Juxtaposition of content – high level and to the point Mary Ann making connections to Michael’s work and challenges Teresa postulated a question directly relevant to Mary Ann’s content More to hold on to that typically in October The first report out of why they are here worked well The tweets were substantial and brief The retrospective on themes and how this theme came about Food was fantastic Interest around the cards The oversized post it notes worked well Think about Is the template for the cards the right...
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