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Expand Your Mind: Learning and Corporate Culture

by Miki Saxon

expand-your-mindToday’s Expand Your Mind offers links to articles that not only inform, but may shake up your views and launch you in new directions.

Learning doesn’t stop when you leave school; it is a life-long process that often requires you to study. Study habits are usually formed early and carried throughout life, but what if the way you were taught to study and that you teach your kids isn’t the best way to learn? That is the intriguing idea coming from new research.

Varying the type of material studied in a single sitting — alternating, for example, among vocabulary, reading and speaking in a new language — seems to leave a deeper impression on the brain than does concentrating on just one skill at a time. … The harder it is to remember something, the harder it is to later forget.

Discussions about corporate culture are everywhere these days. In this short interview Edgar H. Schein, Sloan Fellows Professor of Management Emeritus at MIT offers a new wrinkle on what corporate culture means theses days; he says to think in terms of cultural islands and the need for disparate groups to be synergistic, rather than homogenous. To all his examples of various cultural sources I would add the culture of individual managers, from CEO to team leader.

You are never going to integrate all of these cultures but you have got to get them aligned and get them working toward the same purpose.

Important as aligning sub cultures is, it can’t happen when the culture is as badly damaged as Home Depot’s after Bob Nardelli ran amok. Surprisingly, it is Frank Blake, another GE alum, recruited by Nardelli, who is successfully changing that.

Frank Blake’s mellow, it’s-not-about-me style helped him move Home Depot past the emotionally charged reign of predecessor Bob Nardelli and recapture some of the culture fostered by its founders. It also syncs with his push to get the company back to its service-oriented roots.

Finally, an exclusive, in-depth look at Foxconn, the ultra low-profile Chinese company that manufactures iPhones, PlayStations, and Dell computers, whose profile was raised in headlines of worker suicides.

Rather, [the celebration] was a joint production of employee unions and management at Hon Hai Precision Industry, the flagship of Foxconn Technology Group, as part of an effort to mend the collective psyche of a Chinese workforce that numbers more than 920,000 across more than 20 mainland factories. The need to do so became apparent after 11 Foxconn employees committed suicide earlier this year, most of them by leaping from company-owned high-rise dormitories. The publicity-averse Taipei-based company and its 59-year-old founder and chairman, Terry Gou, were thrown into the spotlight, subjected to unfamiliar scrutiny by customers, labor activists, reporters, academics, and the Chinese government.

Enjoy and have a great weekend.

Flickr image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/pedroelcarvalho/2812091311/

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