November 2008 Pinnacle

Working within Global Boundaries Part 2

The forces, trends, and pace of the business environment have the single greatest influence on shaping organizational culture. But there are even more global forces affecting the business environment in subtle, but profound ways. The Breckenridge Institute® has identified Four Global Boundary Conditions that will define the logical geography of the business environment for the next 50 to 100 years. This month we feature the second of four – The Global Redistribution of Knowledge, Power and Wealth.

“Peter Drucker was a visionary,” states Mark Bodnarczuk, Executive Director of the Breckenridge Institute®. In 1997, Drucker predicted that the under-population of developed countries in North America, Japan, and Europe and the sharply rising birth rate in developing countries had irrevocably changed the landscape of the world’s economy for the next 100 years. “Global advances in science and technology combined with demographics have flattened the playing field for emerging nations like India and China,” states Bodnarczuk. “For example, calls made by Americans to customer service centers are often routed seamlessly to technical experts in India or other emerging nations.” Economic growth in developed countries like the U.S. cannot come from putting more people to work or from an increased number of domestic consumers, so it must come from the increased productivity of knowledge workers, which creates increasing pressure to do more with less. This trend will only intensify as the global redistribution of knowledge, power, and wealth runs its course. “We believe that the global redistribution of knowledge, power, and wealth has already dramatically changed the workplace and will become one of the biggest issues that corporate culture must contend with,” Bodnarczuk commented. Consciously creating a corporate culture that mitigates the down sides and pressures of these global trends and identifies and capitalizes on myriad new opportunities is the key strategy for controlling an organization’s destiny.

Next Time: The lead article in the January issue of the Pinnacle will feature the third of Four Global Boundary Conditions within which organizations must operate – Competing Political, Cultural, and Religious Ideologies.

HBR Editor’s Blog

Every month, the senior editors of the Harvard Business Review (HBR) invite internationally recognized organizational theorists and practitioners to raise issues and answer questions about leadership and management issues on the HBR Editor’s Blog. This month, we provide Pinnacle readers with links to two important and interesting discussions (see below).

Rosabeth Moss Kanter, A Financial Turnaround Requires Culture Change
Vineet Nayar, What Leaders Can Learn from Children

We encourage you to join the conversation on the HBR Editor’s Blog and voice your opinions, commentary, and insights on these and other important topics.

Update

•	Mark Bodnarczuk has published a new article in the peer-reviewed journal, Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences, entitled, “Megascience in Particle Physics: The Birth of an Experiment String at Fermilab.” The article is an historical analysis of how particle physics experiments were performed at Fermilab within the context of the laboratory’s scientific, sociological and cultural norms.
•	The Breckenridge Institute® has developed a key partnership with Qualifying.org Inc. - one of the world’s largest and most well-established providers of qualifying programs in the areas of personality and leadership development. Qualifying.org will be offering a webinar-based qualifying program for the Breckenridge Type Indicator™ (BTI™) beginning in February 2009. For more information or to sign-up now for the BTI™ qualifying program go to www.qualifying.org, or contact them at 336-774-0330 or info@Qualifying.org
•	The new Breckenridge Culture Indicator™ (BCI™) is an effective alternative to 360-Degree-Reviews that allows you to evaluate a manager’s leadership and management skills within the context of an organization’s structures, systems, and culture. The BCI™ is now available to qualified users 24X7 anywhere in the world with an Internet connection. Contact Elin Larson for details on how you can begin using this exciting new tool in your organization or with your clients (970-389-4666 or elin@breckenridgeinstitute.com).
•	For a more complete listing of recently published on-line articles, white papers, and books from the Breckenridge Institute® go to http://www.breckenridgeinstitute.com/our-publications.htm.
•	Download our free brochure

Breckenridge Institute^®

If you would like information about the Breckenridge Institute’s research activities, portfolio of assessment tools, or consulting services, visit our website at www.breckenridgeinstitute.com. Also visit http://www.linkedin.com/in/markbodnarczuk.

Culture Corner

“Cultures begin with leaders who impose their own values and assumptions on a group. If that group is successful and the assumptions come to be taken for granted, we have then a culture that will define for later generations of members what kinds of leadership are acceptable.”

Edgar Schein,
Organizational Culture and Leadership

Toolbox

Enneagram Assessment Tools

The Breckenridge Institute® has developed two new assessment tools based on an Enneagram model of personality that are the most reliable and valid on-line Enneagram assessment tools available anywhere. These are the Breckenridge Type Indicator™ (BTI™), and the Breckenridge Relationship Indicator™ (BRI™). The BTI™ and BRI™ are the only Enneagram assessment tools that precisely measure both the nine personality types and three instincts (sub-types) in a single instrument, providing new insights into a wide range of cognitive, emotional, sensory, and biological dimensions of personality. Previously, many type professionals have had reservations about using the Enneagram as a personality typology because they have not had a psychometrically validated instrument with reliability and validity equal to (or greater than) the MBTI® tool. The BTI™ and BRI™ are designed to meet these psychometric challenges and will add new dimensionality to more traditional approaches to personality.

Contact Elin Larson at elin@breckenridgeinstitute.com or 970-389-4666 for details about how you can begin using this exciting tool in your organization or with your clients.

What We’re Reading

Bruce Wexler, Brain and Culture

This book is an eye-opener. Wexler, a neuroscientist and psychiatrist, begins by reaffirming the powerful affect that parents, siblings, and peers have on stimulating and shaping the synaptic structures and neuropsychological development of a child’s brain in the first years of life, then expands the notion of the “environment” to include the broader influences of the human-created environments we call culture. The weight of scientific evidence presented by Wexler supports his claim that “culture” (physical structures, laws, codes of behavior, food, clothes, spoken and written language, and the media) actually shapes the human brain to a degree that is unprecedented among other animals. Wexler states that, “It is this ability to shape the environment that in turn shapes our brains that has allowed human adaptability and capability to develop at a much faster rate than is possible through alteration of the genetic code itself.