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May 16, 2014
Frank Witsil, writing for the Detroit Free Press, covers the inaugural Positive Business Conference. In the article, he quotes the Center’s Chris White and Shirli Kopelman.
“About 350 students, academics and business leaders gathered this week at the University of Michigan for the first Positive Business Conference.
“‘Our mission is to develop leaders and make a difference in the world,” Chris White, the managing director for the Center for Positive Organizations, said Friday. ‘Positive businesses create economic value, create great workplaces and are good neighbors.'”
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May 15, 2014
In a piece for Bloomberg Businessweek, Shirli Kopelman writes about the importance of teaching business students how to negotiate:
“If business schools are to graduate leaders who “do no evil,” to paraphrase one of Google’s principles, then we must teach them how to negotiate.
“This may seem like an unorthodox approach to minting a new generation of ethically minded managers. The fact is negotiating can be a useful vehicle for doing good deeds. All sorts of negotiations happen on a daily basis, whether we’re aware of it or not. It’s a negotiation when we want our idea selected in a staff meeting, when we want to move a project deadline, divvy up team responsibilities, and even decide where to go for lunch.”
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May 14, 2014
An interview with the Center’s Managing Director, Chris White.
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May 8, 2014
By: Christy Vanek
Traveling takes us away from what we know. It requires us to reorient ourselves and in the process offers the opportunity to know ourselves, our habits, and our values anew. I recently traveled to Lima and Machu Picchu with a course titled “Doing Business in Peru” at the Stephen M Ross School of Business. During this trip, I came to better understand some of my values related to positive organizational scholarship and grew in my ability to enact these values.
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May 6, 2014
By: Adam Grant
“Being a leader is a complex task, but the defining moments of great leadership can be surprisingly simple. As a father of three kids under six, I’ve noticed some striking parallels between the morals of bedtime stories and the legacies of illustrious leaders.
If I were building a leadership library, I would stock it with these nine children’s books. Each captures a key decision of a favorite leader, and matches up with research evidence.”
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May 2, 2014
Reporting for the Grand Rapids Business Journal, Charlsie Dewey interviews the Center for Positive Organizations’ new executive-in-residence, Fred Keller. Fred is CEO of Cascade Engineering, the second-largest certified benefit corporation in the world.
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April 29, 2014
By: Adam Grant
Several decades ago, a team of experts built the world’s most expensive mirror. It was for the Hubble Space Telescope, and the mirror was the key to focusing light that predated the stars, capturing images that had never been seen by human eyes. The precision was measured in millionths of an inch. If the mirror’s surface were the size of the Atlantic Ocean, the surface would need to be so smooth that no wave would be taller than three inches.
When the telescope launched in 1990, the images came back blurry. The mirror was the wrong shape by 2 percent of the width of a human hair. It couldn’t focus light with the required precision. The telescope was only able to do about half of the work that it was launched to do, and in 1993, NASA burned several hundred million dollars on a repair mission.
What went wrong? When journalists Robert Capers and Eric Lipton investigated, they discovered that the team of designers, engineers, and technicians at Perkin-Elmer resisted help from experts. When initial tests of the mirror pointed to potential problems, the engineers refused an independent test. To safeguard against errors, the company appointed a former chief scientist, Roderic Scott, as a consultant and adviser. Scott was a world-class optical designer with an astronomy doctorate from Harvard, but the team refused to seek his support and follow his guidance. As Capers and Lipton put it, “Whenever Scott knocked on the door of the polishing room, the technicians… would say, ‘Hey, Rod is out there. Don’t let him in. Turn up the radio.'”
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April 28, 2014
In an article for Business Insider, Aaron Hurst outlines 10 ways to set yourself up for success in new job. His ideas are inspired by his own personal experience, as well as the research of Justin Berg, Jane Dutton, and Amy Wrzesniewski. “Starting on your first day,” Hurst writes, “you can begin to do what workplace researchers Justin Berg, Jane Dutton, and Amy Wrzesniewski call job crafting. It is the process of taking control of your own destiny and shaping your job to meet your needs and not just your employer’s.”
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April 24, 2014
By: Camille Piner
“I am officially done with college. I’ve turned in the last assignment of my undergraduate career. As I walked out of my last class ever, I tried to decide how I felt–somewhere between extremely relieved and terrified beyond all reason. For the past few days I’ve been thinking about this a lot.
Recently I’ve been trying to figure out what I learned in college (besides how to pass my classes, get along with other people, and live independently). Inevitably, things happen that we could never prepare for. No matter how much we can think ahead, college seems to have shown me that the unpredictable always happens. And this is a fact of life that’s not going to change any time soon. Challenges are always going to face us, whether it’s writing an 18-page paper in one night, having to apologize to a good friend, or having to take out loans to afford grad school. Challenges are inevitable, but learning how to cope in spite of them is what will help us in the end. And I think this starts with a positive attitude.”
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April 22, 2014
In an article for Business Insider, Aaron Hurst mentions the importance of the work of Amy Wrzesniewski and Jane Dutton, as well as the value of Job Crafting:
“Pioneering psychologists like Amy Wrzesniewski, an associate professor at Yale, and Jane E. Dutton, a professor at the University of Michigan have been studying the nature of meaning at work for over a decade now. Their work is enabling us to begin to understand how we can take control of the meaning we experience at the office.
“In studying job crafting, the process of redesigning a job to boost meaning, they found that people could increase their sense of purpose by adjusting their tasks, relationships and approach to their work. These are all actions we can take in just about any job. They don’t require re-writing your job description.”
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April 19, 2014
Aaron Hurst, in an article for the New York Times, urges the importance of engagement in the workplace, citing research from Jane Dutton and Amy Wrzesniewski:
“Finding meaning is about being engaged. When Amy Wrzesniewski, an associate professor at Yale, and Jane E. Dutton, a professor at the University of Michigan, along with other researchers, looked at workers in a wide range of organizations, from hospital cleaners to administrators and managers, they found several ways in which workers crafted purpose in each profession.
Their findings reinforced previous research that had demonstrated that the ways individuals viewed work might be more tied to their personality traits than to the work itself. They infuse their work with purpose learned from past experiences. How they view work may largely be driven by the role models they had growing up. Some see it as merely a chore in their lives, while others view it as the core of life.”
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April 17, 2014
Research suggests that compassion matters at work, and has positive effects on both those who demonstrate it in response to suffering, and those who experience compassion from others. In the recent article “Compassion at Work” for Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, Jane Dutton and her co-authors define compassion and suffering, review what researchers currently know about compassion at work, and discuss implications for practice and for future research. Dutton et al. note that, “The timeliness of a focus on compassion at work arises from new scientific evidence and recent calls for more enriched relational perspectives in organizational psychology.” The authors note that suffering at work can arise from events in one’s personal life, from the work itself, from negative interpersonal experiences at work, or from organizational actions, and cite the hundreds of billions of dollars businesses lose annually because of grief, stress, and burnout suffered by the individuals who comprise them. The authors describe research on the role of compassion in responding to this suffering.
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