Corporate Culture

Emotionally healthy business cultures

Post author By Stéphanie Mitrano
Post date September 24, 2019

Since my TEDx talk “emotions at work” 4-5 years ago, I have been writing a few articles about how emotions can have a very useful place in companies and add value to innovation strategies. What I haven’t written about yet is what I’ve been doing these past few years in organisations to enable emotionally healthy cultures. In this “3-tips” article I am sharing the key messages I use in many workshops and trainings (whether at Airbus, Rotterdam School of Management, European Central Bank or TNO), some obvious reminders, some counter-intuitive notions and some challenging practices.

Tags emotional intelligence, emotions, healthy business cultures, Healthy culture

Corporate Culture

Interview – A Finance Transformation Expert at DSM

Post author By Stéphanie Mitrano
Post date April 19, 2019

So I’ve decided to continue the series of transformation leaders’ interviews and I’m starting this year with Thierry Zedda, a French engineer, currently working as a Performance and Portfolio Manager at DSM [one of the largest Dutch companies with 10 bill € in revenue, and employing over 20,000 people]. Going from engineering to finance to more transversal roles, leading or involved in complex large scale transformations and with the creation of a knowledge platform [aqboost.com], Thierry has an interesting experience and perspective on finance transformation.

His engineering background grants him a pragmatic approach to transformation and a penchant for technology. But don’t be fooled, Thierry is curious but not crazy for the techno hype we have seen recently entering finance (automation, AI, block chain etc.). And for a finance guy, he has learned to look way beyond the figures and work with the cultural change required to really implement beautifully crafted solutions.

The two key subjects that struck me in our conversation were :

His passion for helping the finance profession to question itself and do a real introspection about its roles, about the meaning of new technologies and about its valuable new position in the organisation.
Measuring the effectiveness of mindset transformation with maturity assessment, non-financial KPIs and storytelling.

Tags Finance transformation

Corporate Culture

Cultural Transformation – Communities Over Tools

Post author By Stéphanie Mitrano
Post date October 24, 2018

During the past few years, whether discussing mentoring programmes or cultural transformation with large corporations, I am faced with a disproportionate belief in “tools”. I think I need to clarify that it is not because as consultants we use tools that we sell tools. A keynote from Frédérique PAIN I organized recently for one of our key customer, confirmed what I’ve been seeing for years: too many French and European companies have a disproportionate belief and trust in « tools » and methodologies. Our common Western culture and history of engineering development and thinking put a strong bias toward reproductible, documented approaches to problems.

But when dealing with people and cultural transformation, tools are far from enough.

Tags cultural transformation

Corporate Culture Mentoring Culture

M&A: Overcoming the Culture Shift Challenge

Post author By Stéphanie Mitrano
Post date October 18, 2018

When I wrote the “Mentoring by FabMob” white paper, I was already hinting at an example of use of mentoring to facilitate the cultural integration in the case of acquisition of a new entity. I do not wish to go into the well documented difficulties that large companies face when they are merging or acquiring, how people issues come into play, and how the integration of different ways of working, thinking, communicating can put a real spanner in the works. Even though we all know it is a challenge, still very little M&A really work on the cultural aspect, and very little use mentoring as a tool for creating real human connections for a faster blend of cultures.

Tags Culture shift, mentoring

Corporate Culture

The most common misconception about innovation

Post author By Philippe Méda
Post date October 2, 2018

As many professionals in my field, I get this question a lot: « What is the most common misconception about innovation? » The short answer is that most of the time, innovation is discussed and operated as a single thing. It’s not. It’s a complex blend of diverse forms of « innovations » that obey different rules, different mindsets and requires different tools.

The long(er) answer is: