|
The Organizational Sweet Spot |
|
The Organizational Sweet Spot: Engaging the Innovative Dynamics of Your Social Networks
Ehin, Charles
2009, Approx. 170 p., Hardcover
ISBN: 978-0-387-98193-2 Offers guidance to business leaders searching for ways to increase the innovative dynamics , motivation and performance of their knowledge workers Employee disengagement is one of the most pressing problems plaguing managers today hampering the innovation capacities of countless organizations. According to recent polls, some 20 percent of workers report feeling disconnected from their jobs, in an environment of stagnating wages, massive layoffs, rising health care costs, and other factors that contribute to alienation, distrust, and apathy. In The Organizational Sweet Spot, Dr. Charles Ehin takes a refreshing new look at what it will take to reengage the disaffected worker and boost their resolve to advance novel ideas. Applying the latest research from such fields as evolutionary psychology, social neuroscience, organizational behavior, anthropology, and social network analysis, Ehin demonstrates how employee disengagement is rooted in a fundamental misalignment between people’s instinctive drive to develop their personal and group identities through informal or "emergent" relationships and the ways in which organizational goals and profit motives are executed through formal bureaucracy. The challenge for today’s organizations—which operate under constantly changing conditions—is to narrow this gap, that is, to find the "sweet spot," where the formal and informal elements of the organization overlap. Ehin provides practical tools for leaders to support this "shared access domain" to improve productivity, catalyze innovation, and inspire exceptional performance. His new model is likely to reverberate throughout current management thinking as we move toward creating more vital and meaningful workplaces. |
|
Hidden Assets: Harnessing the Power of Informal Networks |
|
 Hidden Assets: Harnessing the Power of Informal Networks
Ehin, Charles
2004, 200 p., Hardcover
ISBN: 978-1-4020-8081-4
Read an Excerpt Based on his diverse personal experiences and two decades of interdisciplinary research, Dr. Ehin unveils the "mysteries" and shows the practicality of tapping into the ever evolving, yet extraordinarily powerful, informal networks present in all social groups. What this book reveals is the extraordinarily dynamic and tight linkage between three "hidden" organizational success factors responsible for most work accomplished in both for profit and nonprofit ventures, especially in the development of new innovations. The book shows why in a knowledge economy it is essential to design organizations that facilitate the fundamental collaborative and creative qualities of human nature rather unconsciously suppressing them. In doing so, it is made obvious why most mergers and change efforts fail and the reasons why an average employee only works at two-thirds of his/her capacity. This work clearly demonstrates how "smart" institutions can harness, rather than manage, these invisible emergent forces and in the process avoid the dismal record of past organizational transformation initiatives. Hidden Assets is a must read not only for top executives, knowledge professionals, and organizational scholars, but for everyone associated with private, public, or voluntary social institutions. Written for:
Scholars in industrial organizational, business, and management science, knowledge professionals, corporate executives and upper management |
|
|
Unleashing Intellectual Capital |
|
 Ehin, Charles
2000, 224 pages, paperback
ISBN: 0750672463, ISBN13: 9780750672467
Read the Forward
Read the Introduction "Unleashing Intellectual Capital" reveals breakthrough principles for structuring Knowledge Age organizations. It helps leaders and knowledge professionals better understand how human nature supports or undermines voluntary workplace collaboration and innovation-vital sources of competitive advantage in business. Integrating the latest insights from diverse scientific disciplines, the book re establishes some very basic truths about human innate behavior that determine how people best work together and are managed, or in some cases "unmanaged."Using understandable and practical models, "Unleashing Intellectual Capital" explains human nature and offers readers a comprehensive framework they can use to generate sustained high levels of intellectual capital within their own organizations while at the same time reducing workplace violence. It demonstrates clearly what ails most knowledge-based organizations today-the gap between unchanging human nature and management systems. It illustrates how the latest research in a variety of fields can redefine management.
It provides the most comprehensive framework to date for generating, capturing and leveraging intellectual capital based on a thorough understanding of human nature. |
|
 Aftermath
Ehin, Charles
2004, 191 pages, paperback
ISBN: 1413733875, ISBN13:978-1413733877
Beginning with the author’s return to Estonia in 1982 to meet relatives not seen for nearly four decades, Ehin chronicles not only the bloody results of the back-and-forth War as it battered Eastern Europe, but also day-to-day life of soul-smothering bureaucracy, tyrannical policies and burning prejudice that survived the war. The story is told in the first-person in a way that brings the reader right into Eastern Europe, to the moment at hand with its troubled history. With his eye for the “small” detail, the story comes alive, and points to the larger, underlying conflicts of past and present. Aftermath shows the current problems in Eastern Europe and describes the past history that has led to these problems. It does so without losing the emotion of the moment. Aftermath is a valuable exposé of a courageous people who faced horrors beyond belief, a people whose story is seldom told in the West, and a story about war and its aftermath that needs to be heard in a country involved in conflict, and likely to face greater conflict. Aftermath reveals the heart-wrenching catastrophe of war, whether for victim, perpetrator, by-stander or hero. When blood is spilled, there are no winners, only various kinds of pain. The author reveals some of his own deeply personal hurts and confusions, both as a boy struggling with an adult world-gone-berserk, and as a man who returned and tries to understand. Aftermath takes us through a world of Eastern European history seldom seen. Throughout the book, both author and story keep alive a hope -- a hope for reform,for progress, for a potential that certainly IS there -- a hope that this potential for peace and understanding might become reality in us all. To say that the book is deeply-moving,
enlightening and currently necessary is to border on cliché, but it is that. And more. Aftermath is well-told, historically accurate and with a message that needs to be heard sooner rather than later. A warrior, it is said, understands war best. Ehin has that understanding, and out of it, brings us a provocative story and his own insightful observations to try to put warriors out of business, and back into life. Michael Markowski, Ph.D., Professor of History, Westminster College of Salt Lake City |
|
Publications 