Walking the Talk Blog

If you haven't had a chance to read my first entry in this series, ‘Defining Culture… It’s NOT Engagement', for the purpose of today’s discussion, all you’ll need to know is that culture is a separate construct from engagement. Both are absolutely critical and can be aligned. However, the analogy is something like comparing revenue and profit - they are kind of linked, but there are also a lot of variables between them.

 
 
At Walking the Talk, we like to use the following definition of culture:
 

I recently had to renew my European passport because it had expired.

As I live in Australia, the only place I could do this was the consulate. My experience of consulates in general – and this one in particular – is that they epitomise bureaucracy (If you’ve had to apply for a visa in the past I am sure you know what I mean.) As a consequence, I always make sure I have all the documents I need – and more – just in case. This time, I visited the consulate’s website to check out the requirements and noticed a link to click on to obtain more detail. But the link wasn’t working, so I simply guessed what I needed to bring and made the appointment.

"Are most CEOs too old to innovate?"

 
A delicate, but important question, raised in the title of an HBR article last week by Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman.

Sometimes it’s good to get back to the basics...

It's easy to slip into the habit of thinking about your culture as a project, or a series of activities that have to be performed: Communication training, values alignment process, reward systems, workplace redesign— tick, tick, tick. But culture isn't separate from normal business activity, it is created through what is done every day.

Our CEO, Carolyn Taylor, was guest speaker last week at a very special symposium hosted by our partner, Mindfulness at Work, and JP Morgan. Other speakers included Arianna Huffington, Mindfulness at Work’s Louise Cox Chester, president of the Mindful National organisation, Krinsha Pendyala, clinical psychologist, Dr. Chris Irons and David Pearl.

Image by Jonathan Perugia