Posts Tagged ‘Montreal’
I once asked a guy named Pedro, who had spent his life founding and working in one of the Mondragon industrial cooperatives, what his most engaging organizational experience had been. He gave me a kind of half-smile. “It was when we went bankrupt.”
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Last year, we wrote a blog post highlighting the work of Jonathan Glencross. Jonathan’s approach to environmental advocacy has helped spark some dramatic sustainability initiatives at McGill University. We thought you’d enjoy listening to a TedxTalk that he gave a few months ago to an audience of 700
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I once worked at an advocacy and training organization where, in an effort to look more professional in the eyes of our funders and partners, it was decided that all correspondence would have a uniform look- even down to the font that we used in our emails. I could handle the idea of uniformity for […]
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The most catalytic organizational practice I’ve encountered lately is humblingly simple. It involves nothing more than pausing in the middle of a meeting or discussion and going around the room to hear from each person how they are actually experiencing the issue at hand – right now, in the moment. It seems like an obvious […]
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Several years ago, when I was in the thick of major organizational shifts at COCo, I came home one evening in a fit of tears and with a back full of knots. I felt horrible about how things felt at work and frustrated that my attempts to move things to a better place seemed to […]
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Just thought I’d share this article that I wrote for the Centre for Community Organizations (COCo) last June. ——– A couple of years ago when we first began our restructuring at COCo, we considered the possibility that COCo had run its course and asked ourselves the question: Was it time for the organization to end? And while we ultimately […]
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I’m seeing it again. The tilt toward everything. Most people say it is impossible. That community is always closed. That we only know where we belong when we know whom and what we have barred. In a review of several books on community participation, Malcolm Payne argues that community identity is necessarily formed through a […]
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I really enjoyed reading Alex’s recent post on Foulab. It got me thinking of how similar our relationship to technology is to our relationship to organizations. So much of our waking energy flows through and around organizations, yet we rarely take time to really understand how they work and to empower ourselves to tinker with […]
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My friend Jim is a hacker. Not the kind of hacker who sits at a computer trying to break into highly classified computer systems – that’s a highly simplistic portrayal. No, he’s the kind of hacker who approaches many of the aspects in his life with a mindset that is critical, analytical and creative. And […]
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My friends Tolu and Ronke run a cleaning company that is unlike any cleaning company I have ever come across. They see Zenith Cleaners as a vehicle through which they can create the kind of world they want to live in, a world that is not just healthy and aesthetically beautiful, but deeply rooted in […]
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