In “How To Create a Culture Manifesto for Your Organization (And Why It’s a Good Idea)”, written by Mollie West, a workplace strategy for nonprofits, social enterprise, and benefit corps is outlined. West encourages her readers to implement a “humanifesto” that is composed of the organizations internal core cultural values. She provides examples of 3 companies (Method Products, Etsy, and Warby Parker) that have used this tactic and explained their outcomes. She also lays out the steps for readers to craft their own.
West tells the reader why companies should incorporate a “humanifesto” and the potential benefits of implementing it … foster innovation & collaboration, attract talent, etc.
Comparing and contrasting.
West compares and contrasts how companies approach a “humanifesto” differently.
Defining
West defines what a “humanifesto” is.
Explaining a process
West outlines how readers can implement this technique into their own organization.
Target your audience
West clearly states who this piece is intended for.
2. I was hoping to shift my lens towards the experience of women in the workplace. I have not figured out whether my focus will be on harassment/sexual assault and/or pay gap inequality and/or unfair health quality that does not support female needs like contraceptive and abortion access. Depending on the subtopic, the intended audience will change. However, I think I will ultimately present a media form intended for company executives on ways they can support women given the challenges they endure. I like posters and infographics; however, a PowerPoint presentation might serve as a more persuasive/appropriate method. I need to spend some time doing research on this area before I have a clearer idea of the path I want to take. I probably will start my search with google.
Author Mollie West helps companies to create good organizational culture. In her article “How to Create a Culture Manifesto for Your Organization (And Why It’s a Good Idea), Stanford Social Innovation Review, she examines the manifestos of three companies. West gets into examples right at the start. There is a section for each company with a header naming the company and what they sell. She provides a synopsis of each company’s manifesto, what spurred them into creating it and who wrote it. She provides links to the companies’ websites and includes photos from each workplace. Last, she provides an update on what each company is doing currently. Finally, after focusing on what she most likely believes are outstanding models of company manifestos, West proceeds to educate readers on how they too can create a statement of their organization’s core cultural values. It is understood, based on the publication her article appears in and the companies she chose to highlight, that the audience she is attempting to reach are social change leaders in business. Most leaders don’t have a lot of spare time, so when they read an article, it’s because the title was catchy (perhaps it mentions a problem that needs solving). The content is straight to the point, easily digestible, visually appealing, not too long and offers solutions. I believe Ms. West was adept at including all of those elements in her article and will surely reach and inform her intended audience.
Response #2
I am strongly considering writing my area of research as an online business magazine article in order to reach leaders of organizations. Part of my decision-making process stems from the material I want to convey. Because equity and inclusion for Black people might be considered an important and hot topic in this moment for some, it might also be a divisive or scary one for others. I think (depending on the chosen title) I might reach more people in a magazine that isn’t threatening but also lends its authority to the subject simply by publishing it. An online magazine article isn’t stuffy like a scholarly article, it contains casual or informal language and often tells a story with text broken up into sections with headers. There are images and links to data or more scholarly articles for those so inclined to explore them. As I stated in my first response, leaders don’t have a lot of free time, so an article that is visually appealing, easy to absorb, offers a solution to a problem and is a relatively quick read will be appealing to my intended audience.
In “How To Create a Culture Manifesto for Your Organization (And Why It’s a Good Idea)” by Mollie West, an organizational designer at IDEO, the article examines how companies such as Method Products, Etsy, and Warby Parker create a sense of belonging within their organization. The piece points out the fact that mission statements often focus solely on external goals. Instead of only focusing on the internal environment, West states that an organization should look inward to develop a culture manifesto. West does a fantastic job at illustrating the idea that not everything has to be structured because each employee has a personality that helps compose organizational culture. Companies like Etsy and Warby Parker recognized this. They both had all of their employees at one time or another discuss their views on what makes the company special and come up with catchphrases. West sees this as a critical step towards creating a workplace culture that contains efficiency and happiness. West then goes on to give a list of steps that organizations can take to accomplish this.
West is specifically targeting business owners of various organizations, including but not speaking to HR. She addresses her audience as a sort of business entity, including nonprofits and B corps. I find this interesting because often people address a company as “the organization”, or “(company name)”, but West recognizes that business owners drive the organizational culture and, in turn, realize that they have a significant amount of pull when it comes to creating company culture. I also think that instead of addressing HR, she is addressing influential individuals. She recognizes that HR does not create a company culture, as HR often instills fear in employees because they are scared to show their personalities or quirkiness, in my opinion. Therefore, her target audience is business leaders/owners who actively seek advice on creating a positive workplace.
West starts off her argument by proposing why a company should consider going beyond a mission statement. After that, she uses a strategy that is referenced as the rule of 3. Although I have often seen it in business presentations/PowerPoints, it was pleasing to see it written out in this article. The rule is if you include three examples of something, it is more satisfying and has a better effect on the audience. She uses Method Products, Etsy, and Warby Parker as her three success stories. The stories contained anecdotes about activities or events that transpired that created an environment at each of the three organizations.
West’s use of lists also is beneficial to the reader because it lays out clearly what needs to occur to mimic the workplace environments that Etsy, Method Products, and Warby Parker have. This is effective because oftentimes, business leaders/owners do not have time to read through long paragraphs. They want something short and sweet, with evidence to back up their point. West provides just this in the article and conveys her point brilliantly to the business leaders of the world.
Response to #2
I want to discuss the issue surrounding underrepresentation of women in STEM, why it is important that everyone in business understands the reasons why it occurs, and why it needs to change. I am not completely sure yet, as I am still thinking of how I want to write my paper, but I think that it would be best if addressed to people who just read for their own personal amusement. Basically, people who read the NYT , Forbes, or The Economist as these people are interested in the world of business and enjoy reading about new information or facts surrounding various topics. I think that the kind of text that these readers would most often read is an article in a news source or like in a magazine. Often, these readers engage in these articles on a daily or weekly basis, depending on whether or not it is a daily news source like the NYT or something that gets sent out on a weekly or monthly basis, like certain magazines.
If it were something like a scholarly article, the source would have to be extremely specific. In this case, however, including lots of studies and evidence to back up claims, I can focus less on incorporating all of the evidence and instead focus on the points that my sources make. I think this is a huge benefit of formatting my paper like an article in a magazine or newspaper.
Although less detail is required in this format, there is often still a level of formality when writing within them. It also depends on the author. They could be writing more of a conversational piece, or an informative, more formal piece. I believe that I would take more of a formal approach in my project.
The length of text for my paper would most likely take up one to two pages, just as many stories cover in magazines. I think I could convey my thoughts on the subject I am covering in this length. Although the subject could stretch on for hundreds of pages, I think that since my audience would be a reader who is interested on a variety of subjects, it would be best to keep the paper at a two-page maximum length. As a result, the reading time would depend on the reader, but most likely be a 5-to-10-minute article. I think this would be a good length and time because anything over 15 minutes in my opinion gets boring and the reader wants to move on, especially when they are not directly involved in learning more about the subject. If it were in a scholarly journal on the other hand, this paper would be around 30-40 pages and would take an hour to read.
Although most magazines use interviews as their main source of evidence, I still believe that it would be appropriate to include some evidence linked to scholarly articles, as long as it does not go too in-depth to where the reader cannot follow the subject. I would want to use various articles including firsthand accounts like my TED speeches, interviews used from Forbes, along with some of the scholarly articles that I pulled. I think this would be beneficial as firsthand accounts pair well with scholarly articles whose authors are well respected individuals and experts in their respective fields. Also, in magazines or in articles like the NYT, the citations are directly in the text, instead of after. I would plan on following this format so that the reader understands where each claim/evidence comes from.
I am not completely sure on my paper yet, but writing out a response to this helped me figure out some direction to it. I hope to further plan it out in the coming days and create a draft that helps me illustrate the points and ideas that I want to convey to my audience.
Summary is a task that you’ll encounter often in research-based writing–as an author, you’ll need to explain the essence of a text that you have worked with in developing your own ideas. Writing an effective summary means offering your reader a genuine understanding of the text, not just a list of its greatest hits. Your reader needs a little context–
what is this text?
what is the author doing in it?
what are the key ideas we should take from it?
and then what are you going to do with it?
Because you’ll need this skill regularly, we’re going to practice and use it regularly–we develop writing skills just like any other kind of competency, through examining models, trying it out, and repeating the drill.
You’ll find a handout on Blackboard that offers some more explanation of writing effective summaries. It’s also linked here: Handout on summary
Let’s think about this in terms of the Journal of Leadership and Organizational Studies article we’re reading this week. If you were going to explain this article to someone else, it wouldn’t be enough to say that Gundemir and her colleagues talk about some of the pros and cons of workplace diversity. We wouldn’t know anything about who Gundemir is and why we should take her word for it. We wouldn’t know whether this article was grounded in good research. We wouldn’t know whether the idea that there are more fruitful and less fruitful ways to frame diversity is central to her argument, or a kind of tertiary point that she mentions. We wouldn’t understand what the article is.
A summary like this, however, would offer us a lot more value: In her article…. from the Journal of Leadership and Organizational Studies, Seval Gundemir, an organizational psychologist at the University of Amsterdam, examines how companies’ diversity policies affect the way that minority employees view their own leadership potential within their companies. She reports data from 2 different studies that she and her colleagues conducted. She finds that…..
Notice what that summary does–it offers a quick biographical blurb about the author (which tells us that she’s an academic), lets us know that this is a scholarly article (written by a scholar for other scholars in the field), gives us a window into her data set and methods, and then lets us know what she’s arguing. If we know all that, then anything else that you share with us from the article will be a lot more meaningful. We’ll get why it matters and what evidence there is to back it up.
Because effective summary is so essential to writing about research, we’ll be practicing this skill quite a bit in the weeks to come.
Why it’s important to think about genre
This is a term we’ll use quite a bit throughout the course, so it’s worth taking some time to discuss what it means. We often think about genre in relation to music or movies, where we’re accustomed to using it to refer to different ‘types’ of media. These genre labels communicate something to consumers, shape expectations for what that media will be like, and serve as handy sorting mechanisms for us (what we like, what we don’t, what we’re in the mood for, how we would describe something to another person, etc.)
When it comes to genres of writing, that same sort of understanding applies, but it’s worth pushing beyond this simplistic idea of ‘categories’ (as though they’re just sorting buckets) to understand how and why genres take shape.
crayons sorted into buckets
For starters, genres tend to responses to recurring writing situations–in other words, the same kind of need keeps popping up and we can use the same sort of text to meet that need. Let’s think about applying for a job. That’s a recurring situation, right? Lots of people find themselves having to do that. And there are ways that writing can help to make that situation work.
Now, job application materials–resumes and cover letters–didn’t just emerge spontaneously. They took shape because readers and writers found them to be useful ways of meeting that situational need–front-loaded documents that quickly communicate a job seeker’s qualifications, skills, and experiences. AND they’ve taken the fairly standard form that they do (consistent across many decades) because that pretty standard approach to organizing and formatting makes it possible for the reader to plow through a whole bunch of these documents pretty quickly, while still finding what they need.
Thus, we can think about genres as responsive and organic–developed to meet the needs of writers and readers and changeable depending upon circumstances. They’re not fixed, not static, and not simply interchangeable. We need to match genre to situation–thinking about our readers, about our purposes, about our publication/delivery venues.
Everything you do as a writer is a choice. And our choices are shaped by the situations in/for which we write. This rhetorical situation consists of a few key components, illustrated in the diagram below:
Diagram showing rhetorical triangle of a text–subject, reader, writer
Understanding the rhetorical situation of texts helps us as readers understand what to expect from them and how to read them. And for us as writers, understanding our audience and purpose will help us to craft texts that work for our readers, meeting their needs and expectations and providing them a clear path to understanding.
The texts that you’re reading this week come from 2 rather different genres–Gundemir’s article is a fairly typical scholarly text, written by academics for an audience of other academics in their field and providing the sort of intensive research and analysis those readers demand. The other text by Austin & Pisano is from the Harvard Business Review, a publication with a much broader audience of professionals. They turn to HBR for quick insights into topics they might be interested in and are generally not looking for the same kind of deep-dive. When you know what you’re looking at, it’s much easier to navigate through it.
Now, because most of us are not organizational psychologists (I presume), Gundemir’s text isn’t really designed for us. We have to make our own path through it. There’s a handout on Blackboard (also linked here: Handout on Reading Scholarly Articles ) on how to wade through sometimes dense scholarly articles like this one.
