Editor’s Choice Articles for Week Ending Jun 15, 2012

Article of the Week
Lessons From The Founding Fathers On Leading A Breakthrough Meeting (Fast Company)
Big Idea:  Today many of us marvel at what the founders wrought in those hot months of the summer of 1787. But it is important to recognize that, without the steps they took to make the meeting a success, they would not have achieved the breakthrough that is the Constitution. How did the founding fathers accomplish such a feat? The lessons below explain why and provide excellent rules to follow if you too are trying to achieve lasting success.

Editor’s Choice Articles
3 Ways To Bring Your Company’s Core Values To Customer Service (Fast Company)
Big Idea: Brand behaviors are powerful points of differentiation for companies that emphasize them. They are what separate the Nordstroms, JetBlues, and Southwests of the world from rest of the pack. They don’t tell customers what their brands are all about; they use each and every interaction to show customers that the brand isn’t just a symbol, but a philosophy.

What Facebook Knows (Technology Review)
Big Idea: Whatever happens, he says, the primary goal of his team is to support the well-being of the people who provide Facebook with their data, using it to make the service smarter. Along the way, he says, he and his colleagues will advance humanity’s understanding of itself. That echoes Zuckerberg’s often doubted but seemingly genuine belief that Facebook’s job is to improve how the world communicates.

The end of performance management (as we know it) (Management Innovation eXchange)
Big Idea: Statoil is a Norwegian energy company with 21000 employees in 36 countries. On Fortune, Statoil ranks #67 on size but #1 on Social Responsibility and #7 on Innovation. The company has over the last ten years consistently performed above peer average on return on capital and value creation.  We have over several years developed our management model “Ambition to Action” with “agile” and “human” as key guiding principles.  We abolished for instance traditional budgeting in 2005 and decided to leave the calendar year where possible in 2010. Read more about Statoil and our management model in this MIX story: “Taking reality seriously”

Changing Capitalism, One Organization at a Time (Harvard Business Review)
Big Idea: Reimagining capitalism for a new age and a new set of challenges is a sweeping undertaking. So it’s not surprising that we received a striking diversity of entries from every kind of organization and from every corner of the world. That diversity is represented in the final ten winners, but so are a core set of themes that any aspiring long-term capitalist can learn from.

Disappearing Middle Class: Choose Your Market (Inc.)Big Idea: Frito-Lay execs just came out and said it: The middle class is disappearing. Can your product strategy adapt to this new reality?

Broadcasting the Voice of the Customer (Innovation Excellence)Big Idea: We live in a world of corporations and conglomerates, where most of the employee class has no direct access to the voice of the customer.