Arts We Like – Work Arts

Jennifer J. Fondrevay in Work Arts Interview – November 2021

In this Work Arts interview, Brandon Curry and Jennifer J. Fondrevay discuss their individual experiences leading and advising organizations through mergers, acquisitions, and other significant transformations. Jennifer shares how calls for help have changed, including her perspective on lessons leaders have learned from leading through the pandemic that help us lead through transactions and transformations. Brandon and Jennifer also discuss how post-merger integration culture and team development work is different following nearly two years of hybrid and remote work.

Jennifer is the author of the book Now What: A Survivor’s Guide to Thriving Through Mergers & Acquisitions. She is also Founder of Day1 Ready™, a consultancy that advises forward-thinking business leaders, owners, and C-Suite executives on how to prepare for the human capital challenges of M&A. As a Fortune 500 C-Suite “survivor” of three multibillion-dollar acquisitions, Jennifer has been on all sides of the deal equation. She saw countless growth strategies fail due to a workforce that couldn’t pivot and adapt as quickly as leadership anticipated.

When her Harvard Business Review (HBR) article “After a Merger, Don’t Let “Us vs. Them” Thinking Ruin the Company” went viral, Jennifer recognized the power and interest in a human-centric approach to business transformation, where employees are at the heart of the change.

Arts We Like is a series of posts spotlighting great thinkers, ideas, products and partners that we share to help enable remarkable performance through more effective and engaged organizations. Contact Us about how to deploy these solutions as a part of a broader People Strategy or engagements to develop your organization, capabilities and talent.

Arts We Like, Uncategorized

Michael Walsh, Ph.D. in Work Arts Interview

Dr. Michael Walsh is an industrial and organizational psychologist, author, professor and leader of human resources and people analytics. In this Work Arts Interview, he shares some of the foundational ideas of his 2021 book, HR Analytics Essentials You Always Wanted To Know, discusses how changes in work are impacting organizations and their HR professionals’ efforts to build healthy communities that retain talent, and leaves us with practical steps we can take to make better decisions.

Michael currently leads Global Talent Management and Organizational Effectiveness for Eaton Corporation’s Vehicle Group. He also teaches graduate students at the University of Illinois and Wayne State University. Previously, Michael started and led the Global People Strategy and Analytics function at Bloomberg and the People Analytics and Insights Function at Fiat Chrysler Automobiles. Michael began his professional career as a client facing consultant for Mercer’s Human Capital practice focused on HR Strategy, Organizational Design/Development and Human Capital Analytics. He worked for Mercer in Chicago, Dubai and New York.

Arts We Like is a series of posts spotlighting great thinkers, ideas, products and partners that we share to help enable remarkable performance through more effective and engaged organizations. Contact Us about how to deploy these solutions as a part of a broader HR Strategy or engagements to develop your organization, capabilities and talent.

Arts We Like, Uncategorized

Dr. Klint Kendrick in Work Arts Interview

Klint C. Kendrick, Ph.D., SPHR, is a leading voice in HR mergers and acquisitions. In our discussion he shares some rich wisdom for HR leaders, corporate development, M&A practitioners and executives engaged in mergers, acquisitions and divestitures including the backstory on how he entered HR M&A, his view on what makes a great HR M&A professional, and due diligence lessons learned valuable to both buyers and sellers.

Klint is a highly qualified and experienced practitioner, having contributed to more than 85 M&A projects. He contributes to the profession through scholarship, service and writing, including his 2020 book, The HR M&A Practitioners Guide. Klint is a founding Chair of the HR M&A Roundtable.

Arts We Like is a series of posts spotlighting great thinkers, ideas, products and partners that we share to help enable remarkable performance through more effective and engaged organizations. Contact Us about how to deploy these solutions as a part of a broader HR Strategy or engagements to develop your organization, capabilities and talent.

Arts We Like

Julian Chender in Work Arts Interview – June 2021

This Work Arts interview highlights my June discussion with Julian Chender, talking all things Organization Design & Development. We discuss where we’ve come from, where we are going, as well as the foundation of social science and management/business science that shape what we know as organization development.

Julian shares some backstory on the historical foundations of the recent ODReview published article, OD in Times of Disruption, he co-authored with Corrie Voss, MOD, Ed.D. With enduring social science, we continue to appreciate and apply the work of original thinkers like Kurt Lewin, Edgar Schein and Jay R. Galbraith, from the early work in the OD field. On the management/business side, we continue to evolve as organizations face new challenges, leading to the need for both scale and agility. Finally, Julian shares insights on what he is learning as a part of the Fellowship Program at Kates Kesler.

Julian Chender is an Organization Development and Design practitioner and scholar. He oversaw Leadership Development at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease during the global Ebola and Zika outbreaks and then at Veldhoen + Company helped organizations align their culture, technology and physical space to meet strategic goals. He is now a Fellow at Kates Kesler Organization Consulting, part of Accenture, where he consults on large organization design projects. Julian is Founder of the OD Salon and was the 2020 recipient of the OD Network’s Emerging Practitioner Award.

Arts We Like is a series of posts spotlighting great thinkers, ideas, products and partners that we share to help enable remarkable performance through more effective and engaged organizations. Contact Us about how to deploy these solutions as a part of a broader HR Strategy or engagements to develop your organization, capabilities and talent.

Arts We Like

XP Health Co-founders – James Wong and Antonio Moraes – in Work Arts Interview

In this Work Arts interview, you’ll hear from the co-founders of XP Health, James Wong (CTO) and Antonio Moraes (CEO), on how the inefficient service-value chain in optical healthcare is ripe for disruption and how they are bringing deep technology and vertical integration to deliver significant value and an improved employee experience to their customers. This creative company – named to Fast Company’s Annual List of the World’s Most Innovative Companies for 2021 – has the ability to innovate quickly and provide a value proposition and customer experience that has won the business of organizations well known as employee experience leaders including Zoom, Docusign, Sequoia Consulting, Twilio and Chegg.

I’ve had the opportunity to look under the hood at the product and how they go-to-market in 2020 and 2021. XP Health will soon be on the radar of every benefits team, broker and executive looking to improve their employee experience. James and Antonio share how their business model made a significant pivot to accelerate growth through the pandemic as well as their origin stories and vision for XP Health.

Arts We Like is a series of posts spotlighting great ideas, products and partners that we share to help enable remarkable performance through more effective and engaged organizations. Contact Us about how to deploy these solutions as a part of a broader HR Strategy or engagements to develop your organization, capabilities and talent.

Arts We Like, Development, Leadership

Jan Emerton in Work Arts Interview

In late May, I reconnected with my long-time colleague and esteemed collaborator, Jan Emerton of WWConsulting, for a timely talk about our shared experiences developing leaders and executive teams in global corporations and how we can apply what we know about delivering impactful off-site experiences to deliver more effective on-site experiences with remote and hybrid work as the norms going forward.

This topic of how we work and how we gather moving forward is quite polarized presently. In the past weeks, we have seen open letters from prominent company employees articulating their requirements of management, alongside other companies appealing to talent with extensive flexibility. Some voices are appealing to ambitious talent to not be naive – get back to the office as soon as possible to optimize your progression. A less prescriptive, but thought provoking stand out for me personally has been Priya Parker. In interview with Brene Brown – How to Return and Why it Matters she shares some sobering questions:

Are we racing back without asking what we have learned about our work and our teams?

We have this opportunity to broaden reach for talent and to achieve great diversity, yet the past year has had a sizable disparate impact on women and parents.

What have we learned that we want to carry forward?

Jan Emerton is an expert facilitator of international groups, skilled in delivering with empathy, clarity and impact. Jan has deep experience in cross- cultural differences and their implications in the field of communication in international business. She has wide experience in helping groups of executives from different nationalities, to understand cultural differences and to engage diverse groups in learning experiences. She has worked extensively in Europe and North America, and delivers programs in fluent French and English and operational Swedish and Spanish.

Arts We Like, Change

MeBeBot Founder – Beth White – in Work Arts Interview

When communicating and delivering foundational information and services to your organization lag the rate of decision making and change, It’s like a latency tax that constrains performance and frustrates your team.

“…every business must be world class at all forms of synchronous and asynchronous communications, to sustain culture across the organization.”
Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO – The Hybrid Work Paradox

HR, IT and other functional leaders are working to transform their service delivery models to improve employee experience, performance and cost. While many have mature Shared Service Center operations in Best Cost Countries (BCC), these approaches are being challenged with accelerating labor cost inflation, labor scarcity and turnover.

I was recently introduced to MeBeBot and managed to sit down with Founder and Chief Bot, Beth White, to talk about how MeBeBot brings innovative options that deliver many of the benefits of BCC Shared Service approaches while also improving employee experience and cost through technology integrated into Slack and Microsoft Teams.

If you are considering a work enablement strategy to improve the quality, delivery and cost of your functional service delivery, MeBeBot may fit nicely as an investment in automation for highly routinized tasks that do not require significant collaboration. This can strengthen your employee experience, add capacity without adding headcount, and as Beth states, “this is about job elevation.”

This image has an empty alt attribute; its file name is image-1.png — Boston Consulting Group recently published “The How-to of Hybrid Work”

Arts We Like, Uncategorized

The Corporate Artist – Marcus John Henry Brown in Interview

When you choose to brand as Work Arts, you search to see what the world finds when they – hopefully – seek you out in the future. The most interesting thing I found is a British Performance Artist, based in Munich, named Marcus John Henry Brown who publishes amazing media worthy of being shared. He describes his work in a film titled Red Pill Blue Pill as “Lighthearted mixed-media nightmares, that will not be seen in galleries. Stories of the future… impact that you and I are having on the future.”

The video above is part three from a four video series that Marcus published titled the Corporate Artist Series, where he presents working as a corporate artist as way to defend your soul and your workplace from the “Corporate Saboteur” (including the mythical Klaus-Dieter from procurement).

In the series, he reveals that while this might seem crazy, it lines up with what is sacred at Amazon (I asked about the connection. He knows Amazon… his wife is a leader there).

Marcus shares some simple tips and tricks to take a first step as a corporate artist:

Have a curiosity book – find out something new everyday, write it down, to help you value ideas
Take a photograph everyday – it will make you look harder at the world around you, capturing the world a bit more
Go for walks
Create a body of work – order and structure your work – regard it as art
Work hard at understanding why the world works how the world works

I contacted Marcus and asked to have a call with him to talk about his work. He accepted. The discussion was fantastic.

Summarizing time with Marcus without video didn’t seem right…I decided to be adventurous. With a recorded Zoom call, I downloaded iMovie and share with you my very first video. From a very generous 90 minute discussion, I present 11 minutes of Marcus John Henry Brown in interview. Be sure to watch to the end where Marcus shares insights from his Speakery work (5:20) and readings from his clever, provocative and entertaining poem A Wicked Pack of Cards (7:25).

Thank you Marcus!