I recently started working on a poverty-alleviation project with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation—a volunteer opportunity which I've been looking forward to for a while and which I hope to continue over the next few years as a deep-level project alongside my business. While we're just getting started, I am already excited to engage with this team and this project. A big part of what lights me up about this type of work is that it's an opportunity for me to fulfill on one of my callings in life—to leverage my own social privilege and skills to lessen global inequalities and suffering. It sounds a bit lofty, but the work is very real and so is the need for it.
Breaking it down and getting unstuck at Wisdom 2.0
Moving from Hierarchies to Networks: Creating Feedback Loops [online session November 7, 2013]
Smart innovation relies upon information and collaboration to steer it in the right direction, and innovative organizations need to be great at exchanging ideas and opinions among their own departments as well as with their customers and strategic partners. Feedback loops are a straightforward way to invite, collect, and broadcast collective wisdom and put it to good use making better stuff in smarter ways.
Moving from Hierarchies to Networks: Creating Feedback Loops [EVENT 23 July]
Causeit's Principal, MJ Petroni, will be facilitating an interactive PurpleBeach Talking Heads session on the future of leadership and teams. We'll be going through an exploration of feedback loops in three important pillars (teams, clients and industry) and then will collaborate in breakout groups for a quick challenge: how can you create a useful, cost-effective and sustainable feedback loop in under 90 days?
Mind to Matter: twelve weeks to launch your action plan for work-life balance
Cultivating Boredom
Go to Kenya, Learn About Leadership. Free.
Event: Corporate Rebels & Moving From Hierarchy to Network [30 May]
![Event: Corporate Rebels & Moving From Hierarchy to Network [30 May]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/500a17fce4b016a023c03626/1369110681231-H4O41ZL9JW3MTOG33SIJ/CRU+logo.png)
Causeit is proud to participate in @petervan's Corporate Rebels United. We first met Peter Vander Auwera in his work with @innotribe (a Causeit client), and are glad to support his work of helping the corporate rebels and misfits of the world find the best way to apply their brilliance to pressing global issues.
Causeit will be speaking as part of Corporate Rebels United's 24-hour Global Rebel Jam, on the topic of how to prepare organizations for the transition from hierarchies to networks, build feedback loops and cultivate the business case for empathy. Causeit's Principal, MJ Petroni, will be speaking from 2:30-3:00 PT; login and registration details are below, along with some context from Corporate Rebels United.
Feedback Loops, Empathy and the Importance of Outrospection
As the world shifts towards more-networked organizations, the creation of feedback loops is more important than ever. An organization's capacity for empathy determines whether or not its products and services will actually serve the people it is trying to earn money from, and its awareness of what motivates its competitors, regulators and even its own staff will determine its ability to form important strategic alliances, form public-private partnerships and retain its workforce.
Human Technology: A Founder's Journey
Running a company can be incredibly challenging. I started Causeit in 2006, without a clear vision for the business, but with a remarkably big, broad vision for my work in the world. Having done several years of personal, transformative work alongside academic study in my field of Cyborg Anthropology, I was really clear that I was committed to creating love, joy and community in the world.
everal years later (seven, to be precise), I'm still constantly attending to the intersection of my personal and business visions, how they play out in the world, and what it means for my team.
Innovation is… a bike trip? Works for us!
Looking for innovators? Look to Millennials.
I recently attended a “Generational Leadership” seminar to learn how the interaction of different generations of workers affects organizations’ ability to innovate and respond to a rapidly-changing business environment.
The organizations showing up to this conversation have caught on by now: the world is changing… fast. Every day you wake up in a slightly different place. While you were sleeping last night, more information was created in the world than you can process in a lifetime, and somewhere within all that data is a new business model waiting to be discovered. Are the people in your organization prepared to innovate at a rapid pace in order to keep up?
Aww, Shucks—We Love You, Too, Innotribe!
Can Innovation Drive Transformation? Our Intention for Wisdom 2.0
This week, Causeit's team (and our friends Jeffrey Van Dyk, Monique Svazlian and Mariposa Leadership) will be attending Wisdom 2.0. The conference's site speaks for itself, but we thought we'd share a bit about our own intention for wisdom, mindfulness and innovation in a 60-second video.
The Way our Pasts Shape our Careers
Intellectual Property, DNA and Innovation Viruses: Julie Sammons
I keep coming back to the question of "how does nature handle IP?" The closest I can think of is our creation of APIs. Organisms don't walk around with their genetic code sort of displayed for everyone to see, what makes them unique. But there is massive and constant interaction between organisms and their environment, and exchange of information. I think APIs, in a way, are sort of an interesting way of thinking about that. You display enough information about your internal code that others can really interact [with it], and build upon it effectively, without giving away the whole farm—which probably wouldn't even be useful. The other organisms don't even need to know your entire code. That piece is interesting to me.
Teams of Lone Wolves
I first started conceiving of misfits and misfit teams when I began to reflect on my own employment process. As an unusual, "over"-sensitive and intelligent kid with no siblings, I often balked at oversimplified directions, experienced a bruised ego when receiving criticism, and struggled with how to participate in team or group environments. By the time I entered the workforce, I had developed a complex web of insecurities and related defenses designed to protect against the embarrassment of making public mistakes, compensating with my intelligence. It was in my first management position, which happened at about the same time I was engaging in lot of personal development work, that I really saw the impact.
Healing the Wounds of the Assembly Line with Feedback Loops and Doctrine
Often, the focus on the ideal of the cross-functional, interdisciplinary, extroverted worker results in questions being asked which the average employee is insufficiently skilled to answer. In her book Quiet, Susan Cain cites the example of one of her research technical interviewees' recollection of a 'murder board,' a panel of decision-makers whom engineers had to face in order to get their new ideas considered for funding and other resources. One can imagine a hard-faced panel of besuited men tearing down the brilliant if meek engineer with the smug expressions of a young MBA grad: "What's your marketing plan!," they might shout, "
Kits as an Innovation Enabler (and an Indicator Species)
The creation of a kit—literally, as in the Maker world, or figuratively, as in the software world’s APIs and application frameworks—serves as a magnet to whatever industry offers it. Make: magazine’s Project Editor, Keith Sammons, offers why:
The Introversion-Extroversion Spectrum
Introvert seems to be a nasty word these days. It's worth unpacking why, though, according to Susan Cain, author of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. In the book, she point to an overemphasis on the extrovert rooted in the shift from a 'culture of character' to a 'cult of personality,' stemming from the need to find new ways to quickly and repeatedly introduce one's self—to sell one's self—in the newly-urbanized United States in the early part of the 20th century.