Paper Example Undergraduate 1,362 words

Leadership and Organizational Culture Website

Last reviewed: September 9, 2010 ~7 min read

Leadership and Organizational Culture Website Reviews

Website #1 -- John Maxwell on Leadership (http://johnmaxwellonleadership.com/)

John C. Maxwell is an internationally known expert and lecturer on the topic of leadership and on approaches to effective organizational culture. He is the author of several best-selling books, including The 21 Irrefutable Rules of Laws of Leadership (2007) in which he details the specific aspects of personal and organizational leadership associated with organizational success in modern business. He is also the founder of EQUIP, a non-profit organization dedicated to the promotion of principles of servant leadership since 1996, particularly in connection with Christian organizations and perspectives. While EQUIP reflects a religious orientation and philosophy, Maxwell's main website is not geared toward any religious point-of-view or framework. The credibility of Maxwell's websites is mainly a function of his recognized expertise in the field as a contributing writer for respected news sources such as the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.

In principle, Maxwell teaches the crucial importance of the characteristics and habits of successful leaders, among which integrity, strategic vision, selection of high-quality inner circles, and the fundamental commitment to establishing an organizational culture of leadership from within organizations. In that regard, Maxwell teaches that effective leaders and organizations are those which develop leaders from within through an integrated approach to identifying and hiring employees with leadership potential and then systematically cultivating and nurturing their leadership potential through training as well as through a more general immersion in an organizational culture where excellence, integrity, and shared risks and rewards promote leadership potential throughout the organization and every level of its supervisory hierarchy.

Website #2 -- New Paradigm Consulting

(http://www.new-paradigm.co.uk/Culture.htm#Culture%20Theory)

New Paradigm Consulting organization is a virtual consulting venture based in the United Kingdom. It was established by Richard Seel, who was previously a long-time program maker at British Broadcasting Company (BBC). Since 1998, Seel has worked as a professional organizational consultant. His professional qualifications in the field include a Masters degree in Organisation Consulting and having been a Fellow of the British Royal Anthropological Institute and an Associate of the Institute of Management. Like John C. Maxwell, Seel's philosophy provides a mixture of secular concepts applicable to a wide range of organizations and a Christian-based philosophy that is particularly geared toward organizational leaders who wish to apply concepts and theories of organizational culture to Christian organizations. Naturally, to clients who share that perspective, this aspect of New Paradigm Consulting is a plus; conversely, it may detract from the apparent credibility or suitability of the firm with respect to secular organizations or those that espouse distinctly different philosophical perspectives other than Christianity.

While the site is designed to promote the consulting business, it also provides a wealth of literature and links to published resources (many in peer-reviewed publications) on a wide range of topics in the areas of organizational culture, change management, performance measurement, teamwork, culture theory, culture and equality, culture and the individual, and international organizational culture issues. The website seems to be a valuable clearinghouse for credible literature on those topics.

Website #3 -- CityEthics.org (http://www.cityethics.org/)

City Ethics is a non-profit organization founded by Carla Miller in 2000. The organization is dedicated to combating public-sector corruption and establishing ethical local governments. Miller is a former federal prosecutor and Ethics Officer for the City of Jacksonville, Florida. The official mission and purpose of City Ethics is to "provide a centralized location for information and resources for all forms of local government ethics programs." The concept for the organization originated at the 2000 national conference of the Council on Governmental Ethics Laws (COGEL); it was designed to provide needed assistance to cities, counties, and municipalities attempting to address ethical issues. Many of those entities lacked the necessary financial resources to participate as members in the COGEL and the City Ethics project was specifically intended to furnish information and training to government leaders in the area of ethics within the public sector. The qualifications and credentials of the venture's principal and founding member and the fact that its services are not for profit naturally bolsters the objective value of information available through the organization.

The City Ethics project provides extensive assistance to public-sector organizations in the following areas: kkeynote speeches on government ethics, employee training at all levels, group presentations and workshops designed for specific organizational needs, guidance in the development of comprehensive ethics programs on a state, city, or county level, review of existing ethics programs, drafting and improving codes of ethics, ethical issue surveys, and guidance on the application of federal standards in ethics such as in connection with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act and the Federal Sentencing Guidelines.

Website #4

Organizational-Change-Management.com

(http://www.organizational-change-management.com/)

The Organizational Change Management website seems to be a registry for businesses. There is no identifying information for the organization besides an email contact link for inquiries into adding URLs to the website. On one hand, that suggests that the purpose of the venture is to generate fees from websites and other for-profit ventures with an online presence. Naturally, that raises concerns about the credibility, accuracy, and objectivity of the information presented on the site. That is particularly true because many of the listed websites have nothing to do with managing organizational change or any other business management topic. For example, there is a website called Market Splash that provides logo design and website design services; another participating website markets a product called Defender, an anti-oxidant health food product that touts life extension properties.

On the other hand, the actual substantive information published on the Organizational Change Management website presents a surprisingly comprehensive database of organizational management concepts in the area of managing organizational change. Despite the fact that those resources are un-credited, they seem to provide a very extensive outline of some of the most relevant and contemporary issues and concerns in relation to the nature and challenges of organizational change, different types of organizational change, and methods of negotiating and implementing organizational change effectively. Nevertheless, the site should be regarded as an informal source of information or the starting point for preliminary research on change management in organizations, primarily because the purpose of the information seems to be driven by the intention to increase traffic to the sites of participating businesses and because the material presented cannot be identified by author and contains no references to authoritative sources of information.