Written assignments
Charlotte Beers at Ogilvy & Mather, Creating Change and Rebooting a Corporate Legacy
CMN1100, Organizational Communication, based on the Harvard Business School case (McGinn, 2002).
Charlotte Beers was appointed CEO and chairman of Ogilvy & Mather Worldwide in April 1992 and resigned in September 1996. In this short period, she led a revolutionary cultural shift, not only at the agency but across the advertising and marketing industry more broadly, while applying core principles of organizational communication.
When Beers took over, OMW was coasting: deeply respected, historically successful, but struggling with internal fragmentation, fading client relationships, and an outdated operating culture that was eroding morale and dedication. Her approach was to connect with people emotionally rather than through a strictly performance-based structure, framing her efforts against a backdrop of respect for everything the company had already achieved rather than dismissing it. That emotionally intelligent, authentic approach defanged the natural resistance to change and made the organization more receptive to what came next: a coherent, compelling vision capable of uniting employees and clients alike around a new strategic direction.
Beers did not rely on top-down mandates. She engaged with people directly, using respect, language, and vision to redirect the organization’s professional identity. Her tenure was brief and the transformation incomplete by the time she left, but the trajectory she set reestablished OMW’s relevance and recovered ground the agency had lost.
Andrew Bacon – Behavioral Change Experiment Paper
PSY2230, Stress, Resilience, and Behavioral Change.
A personal behavioral change experiment addressing a lifelong difficulty establishing a regular sleep pattern, structured around a deliberate “fresh start” reset, a temporal landmark used to psychologically separate past failed attempts from a renewed effort (Milkman, 2021; Dai et al., 2015). Rather than trying to fix every piece of the problem at once, the experiment narrowed to a single, concrete behavior over three consecutive nights, supported by small environmental changes rather than willpower alone (Wood & Neal, 2007; Clear, 2018).
Presentations
Nonprofit Manager Interview, Brian Young, Action Network. Six slides.
Slide 1, title: Nonprofit Manager Interview, Brian Young, Founder, Action Network. NPM 6150, Human Resource Management in Nonprofit Organizations.
Slide 2: Action Network, Mission-Driven by Design. Founded by Brian Young. Three-entity structure: Action Network, 501(c)(4), training and education; Action Squared Inc., for-profit subsidiary, builds and owns the technology; Action Network Fund, 501(c)(3), organizing strategy and capacity building. Nonprofit structure chosen because the model doesn’t support investor ROI expectations.
Slide 3: HR Without a Dedicated HR Department. Remote workforce, state-by-state compliance complexity, informal but high-expectation HR culture.
Slide 4: DEI and Union Relations. DEI as lived practice, not just policy. Non-adversarial partnership with the organization’s employee union.
Slide 5: Performance Reviews and Internal Integrity. Internal culture must match outward mission, misalignment is a real organizational risk.
Slide 6: Key Takeaways for Nonprofit HR. Invest early in accounting. Facts reduce emotional friction in HR conversations. Mission alignment is the throughline.
XN Presentation – LDR4850
Conclusions section, slides 30 through 38, part of the full XN Project team deck for LDR 4850.
Argues certifications function as entry-level credentials, entry-level hiring is contracting due to AI automation, and certification-only strategies are becoming insufficient without degree integration.
Also completed in the program
Interview summary written assignment for NPM 6150: full document available for download.