Ahh, Saturday. A day to relax, read a few blogs, learn something and maybe take in a flick. And I have it all for you today.

First off we have the yin and yang of employee motivation and retention as brought to you by CIO and HR.BLR.COM.

Let’s start with CIO and an article that explains how corporate policies and procedures kill employee excitement, passion and innovative actions.

Then click over to read a white paper by the University of Scranton’s Sarah K. Yazinski describing how you can minimize turnover and increase positive attitude in the process.

And from a small business owner who grew his business from himself to three companies with combined employment of 104 people, a concise description of how he did it and his four keys to motivating his people. I like his attitude when he says, “There’s an old saying: “A fish rots from the head down.” Corollary: It also rocks from the top.”

Finally, the movie. The NY Times review of Steven Soderbergh’s The Informant! is very intriguing, but the reader comments will give you a more diverse view with which to make your final decision.

Enjoy your weekend!

Image credit: MykReeve on flickr

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A couple of weeks ago I mentioned a discussion going on at Business Week, offering readers the chance to weigh in and comment on serious workplace topics. My error was in misreading that June 30 was the last day to comment—the discussion is still going on. Additionally, there’s a place to offer up stories, pictures and videos of your own wacky experiences in the workplace or just to enjoy others’.

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What does change really entail? Should the focus be doing things differently from this point forward or does it require admitting publicly that the previous approach was flawed?

I get asked this more often than you’d think. It seems as if many people feel that the mea culpa is as important, if not more so, than the new behavior.

I vehemently disagree.

It’s actually far easier to talk about a fault than to actually change it, especially when the cause is rooted in your MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™).

I wrote about this last fall at Leadership Turn. Changing manager’s minds and the comments are a good example of why I don’t believe that mea culpa matters.

As I said then, ‘When admitting the change is tantamount to saying “I was wrong” you’ll find few people jumping up and down to do it.’

Change is difficult enough without the added burden of ‘you/they are right and I’m wrong’. The admission accomplishes nothing more than opening the door to ‘I told you so’—four words that aren’t high on anyone’s motivational phrase list.

What do you think?

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Don’t you love it when experts and powers-that-be formally study and recognize what the rest of us could have told them—namely that constant interruptions ruin productivity.

Remember years ago when that guy in the next cubicle talked too loudly on the phone, constantly got up for coffee or whatever, popped his head over the cubicle wall (or stuck his head in the office) comment/question and was generally distracting?

The interruptions are still happening, only now they’re in the form of email, instant messaging, texting, twittering and other digital annoyances.

A story in the NY Times tells us that the “biggest technology firms, including Microsoft, Intel, Google and I.B.M., are banding together to fight information overload.”

Did you know that “A typical information worker who sits at a computer all day turns to his e-mail program more than 50 times and uses instant messaging 77 times… on average the worker also stops at 40 Web sites over the course of the day…”

So what’s the tab for the unnecessary interruptions? Is it really high enough to warrant the founding of a non-profit group created specifically to combat it?

I guess that depends on whether $650 billion a year gets your attention.

What’s your/your company’s share of that number?

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There are as many definitions and explanations of corporate culture as there are academics, consultants, coaches and every person who works now, has worked in the past or plans to work in the future.

But what about the ‘corporate’ in corporate culture?

What is it other than a piece of paper showing that the government recognizes its existence and it owes taxes?

Is it the office buildings that house it? The manuals that explain it? The stock that represents its value?

Actually, a corporation isn’t an entity at all. It’s a group of people all moving in the same direction, united in a shared vision and their efforts to reach a common goal.

That means that the ‘culture’ in corporate culture is about those people and their MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™).

What’s your definition of corporate and culture?

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What a difference a dozen years make.

When RampUp Solutions started in San Francisco convincing entrepreneurs, let alone VCs, that culture was of critical importance, that corporate culture needed to be architected as carefully and consciously as any product and that hires needed to fit the culture and not just the needed skill set it felt like we were swimming against a tsunami.

We were, but that was then and this is now.

Now people such as Silicon Valley venture capitalist David W. Pidwell give public talks at major universities on “The Attributes of Building a Corporate Culture,” focusing on how entrepreneurs are often so overwhelmed with starting the business that they overlook creating the corporate culture. Pidwell believes that corporate culture provides the core values, policies and practices that define employee behavior and internal operations.

Culture underlies equally the success or the failure of companies of all sizes. In larger companies incoming CEOs ignore the corporate culture at their own risk and are often dumped for either botching it or not changing it.

How important is culture to you?

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