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I had the chance to speak with Dr. José Roldán last week, at the Universidad de Sevilla. We discussed a paper he co-authored last year studying the impact of Cultural Values on Organizational Agility.

The paper considered four cultures and their agility:

• Clan – Strong sense of community and collaboration (example: Tom’s of Maine)
• Adhocracy – Innovative, creative and flexible (example: Facebook)
• Market – Values productivity and results (example: Oracle)
• Hierarchy – Command-and-control (example: military)

Looking at these, the first three would seem to be conducive to agility. The Clan culture has a focus on sharing knowledge across the organization would be an advantage in responding to change. Adhocracy’s leveraging innovation makes change critical to their success. A Market culture has an external focus that allows it to recognize change in its earliest stages.

The highly formalized and regulated structure within a Hierarchy culture should make the organization the least adaptable to changes.

Surprisingly, the research found that the Hierarchy culture actually had a positive effect on the organization’s agility. It may be that the stability offered by the culture is beneficial during times of crisis. The top-down approach allows the organization to respond faster than “management by committee”.

These reminds me of something I read about how special ops teams plan and execute. During the planning stage, the group is flat – each expert brings their talent to the forefront. Once the team begins to execute, the group has a single leader to avoid conflicting instructions at critical times.

Impact of Organizational Culture Values on Organizational Agility

Felipe, Carmen M., José L. Roldán, and Antonio L. Leal-Rodríguez. “Impact of Organizational Culture Values on Organizational Agility.” Sustainability 9.12 (2017): 2354.

Of course, what makes OneNote useful is being able to refer to your notes anywhere – from your office, from home, or even during a meeting at the client site.  To do this, you need to store your notebook on OneDrive.  Your OneDrive account can be tied to your personal account, or to your work account.  There are pluses and minuses for both options, so take a minute to figure out which works for you.  Personally, I use my work account, since that is what I sign into on my work machine.

To use OneDrive, right-click on the Notebooks listing towards the top left. From the drop down, choose properties. In the Notebook Properties window, you have the option of changing the location of the notebook.  If the notebook is not already there, use the Change Location button to navigate to your OneDrive.

Now you can access OneNote from your iPad or phone, as well as your main desktop machine.

In a previous tip, we said that we only use tags for verbs (actions).  So, how do we find all the notes related to a client? Or notes created while in Connecticut? And what about that trick we learned about moving pages around in SharePoint?

This is where the OneNote search function comes in handy.  As opposed to tagging these items, we take advantage of Search to find nouns. For example, if you use a code to identify projects, you can search for that project code.  The search results will show all notes in currently open notebooks that contain that code.

You can also enter someone’s name, which brings up all notes with that person’s name.  This leverages the Meeting Notes feature, which includes the invitees to meetings. Thus, any meeting attended by that person will show up in the search list.

Here is a mini-tip: If I fail to find a note after two searches, I make a list of the searches I used.  Once I find the note, I add the keywords from the failed searches to the note.  This makes it more likely that I will be able to quickly find the note next time I go looking for it.