Organizational culture isn’t just a hot topic—it’s an untapped asset and potential liability for all businesses. And yet, for all its potential to make or break, few know how to manage cultures with proficiency. Culture Your Culture: Innovating Experiences @Work provides the much-needed “how-to” with Design of Work Experience (DOWE). Tapping into human-centered design, interdisciplinary innovation concepts, and other research, this leading edge approach partners employees and their employers in unprecedented ways to co-create solutions and differentiating experiences that are customized, relevant, and profoundly impactful to the organizations for which they are intended—all while building employee engagement, learning agility, and capability.
Be open to changing mindsets, for this is not your typical business book. Part-business case, part-instructional, and part-commentary, the guidance offered here puts your organization–not some detached case studies—at the center to envision how DOWE can help you design solutions and experiences unique to your context.
Culture will no longer be esoteric or intangible, but overt, meaningful, fully leveraged, and truly experienced. No more hacking through trial and error to a culture that lacks sustainability. We can practice the management of culture and organizational change through lived experiences, with intention, rigor, and discipline.
Leaders, managers, teams, and employees alike will benefit from understanding the need for this approach, how it’s defined, why it works, and what to do to successfully tackle business challenges and positively influence lives with this innovative model—if you are willing to do the work to get there.
Endorsements
“This is a book that deserves to be primetime on the bookshelf every change leader! It’s the most powerful and pragmatic synthesis—it unites the best in today’s design thinking, the strengths revolution in management, appreciative inquiry, and the positive psychology of human innovation– I’ve ever seen. With this book you will find that change is more about innovation than intervention, more about creating than solving, and more about home grown rather than decontextualized solutions from elsewhere. If you are looking for a design-inspired and strengths-based change management model, then look no further. Karen has gifted us with something that works and shows us the future of organization development and change.”
–David Cooperrider, Distinguished University Professor, Case Western Reserve University & Honorary Chair, David L. Cooperrider Center for Appreciative Inquiry at Champlain College
“We are living in the age of design. This new age has expanded design thinking well beyond products. Karen Jaw-Madson’s well-written book takes us to new applications of design thinking to the nature of work itself providing fresh ideas especially regarding culture change in organizations. Her book is not a manual, rather an innovative way of thinking about changing organizations.”
–W. Warner Burke, PhD, Professor, Organization and Leadership, Teachers College, Columbia University and Associate Editor, Journal of Applied Behavioral Science
“Karen Jaw-Madson has created an inspiring and compelling framework, using the bedrock foundation of design thinking, that enables organizations to create effective cultural change through a method she has named DOWE. DOWE is designed to help leaders by guiding them through a systematic, step-by-step course of action, mapped to the needs of your organization, that enables the creation of a vibrant and successful company culture.”
–Dennis Boyle, Founding Team Member and Partner, IDEO
“Culture Your Culture is an extraordinarily practical guide to driving transformational culture change through Design of Work Experience (DOWE). It leads you to ask, “How DOWE do it?” and to answer, “By reading Culture Your Culture!”
–Ian Ziskin, President, EXec EXcel Group LLC, and Advisor, Author, Board Member, Coach, Consultant, and Former CHRO
“Culture Your Culture distills Karen’s decades of experience and thinking into a practical process for using design principles to enhance your culture through the work.”
–Dr. John Boudreau, Professor and Research Director, University of Southern California
“Culture Your Culture invites readers to see problems as opportunities in our ever-changing work environments by creating meaningful experiences that allow people and businesses thrive.”
–Tina Seelig, Stanford University School of Engineering, Author, Creativity Rules