By Pamela Rutledge and Bonnie Buckner The Levi’s Go Forth/We Are All Workers Campaign has focused a lot of attention on the town of Braddock, PA. Levi’s uses Braddock to frame a struggling former steel town with a Depression-era narrative. Levi’s linked the culturally iconic metaphor of the Depression with their jeans through story. While branding through storytelling is a powerful communication device, we find the Levi’s campaign questionable and alarming on multiple levels. Drawing parallels between the recession of today and the Great Depression is not only inaccurate but dangerous. It contributes to a public sentiment of fear and anxiety. There are many people struggling right now, but as those who lived through 1930s will tell you, we're not there. At the depths of the Great Depression from 1929-1930, US unemployment was 25%, crop prices fell by nearly 60%, industrial production was down 46%, foreign trade dropped 70%, and the stock market lost … [Read more...]
Drucker and Facebook–Organizing for Change
There's a story about the demise of Facebook in the Washington Post: Worldwide ebb for Facebook. I like the logic--when a company's been around long enough for someone to make a movie out of it, then it's probably on the downhill slide, even if they do get Justin Timberlake. That people are interested in something new shouldn't be surprising to anyone in business, marketing or evolutionary psychology. Same ol', same ol' won't cut it, especially in a world where expectations about the speed of change have reached new highs. But rather than speculate on trends and following the migration across social media tools of whoever's cool, it's time to revisit some words of wisdom from the original management guru, Peter Drucker. Organizations must be organized for innovation. Using economist Joseph Schumpeter's term "creative destruction," Drucker said companies should be: organized for the systematic abandonment of whatever is established, customary, family and comfortable, … [Read more...]
The Positive Psychology Of Entrepreneurship
A version of this post appeared in my blog Positively Media on Psychology Today. There's a lot of buzz about entrepreneurship right now. This is especially obvious if you hang out on LinkedIn, Twitter, or cruise the Ning social networks. It is not surprising, given the amount of people looking for jobs due to cutbacks and restructuring and a few bankruptcies thrown in for good measure. So far, the government plans to promote economic growth have tried to stimulate a lot of things, but stimulating entrepreneurs doesn't seem to be one of them. It's important to encourage entrepreneurship and not just for economic reasons. Entrepreneurship is the ultimate exercise in developing the attributes that we know from positive psychology to be essential to having a good life: self-competence, optimism, engagement, and resilience. I'm against government stimulus the way it's usually done for the same reasons that I'm for entrepreneurship. Sending people checks in the mail may give them … [Read more...]
