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Willpower, self-regulation, impulse control - these are the ingredients for a successful career. A successful life. I don't think so. Because one time doesn't really matter. A dieter chooses to eat a salad. A smoker decides to skip a cigarette. A sex-addict stops calling adult hotlines. A teen passes the joint without taking a drag. A family buried in debt decides to not take a summer vacation. A manager who makes a resolution to not project his/her stress onto employees. - Bravo! But what happens tomorrow?

A few years ago, the world's leading designer and manufacturer of office products decided that it needed an organizational overhaul. Coordination across product lines was poor. Design teams collaborated ineffectively. Key personnel were remote from customers. The company responded in part by reorganizing its work space, creating an office-free "village" where designers and architects could mingle and collaborate and customers could visit easily. Proximity does matter for promoting collaboration, and the space was conceptually compelling and visually appealing.

it comes down to three activities: Listening. Thinking. Speaking. Maybe NET-WORK encompasses story, deciding.

I had intended writing a series of blog posts in the run up to the pilot launch of  The Smart Work Company's social learning platform in September. Turmoil in global financial markets, with the downgrading of the US credit rating and simultaneous shenanigans in the Euro zone, gives focus to the topics I want to explore.
The series, Smart Working in Turbulent Times, will include themes that I have talked about before in previous blog posts in a random way. My hope is that this series will pull topics together to create a rationale for smart working, to explore what it is, to make the case for why now (urgently) and to show how smart working practices can be enabled, drawing on researching new ways of working over a fifteen year period and years of practical experience of helping senior executives make the transition to new ways of working.
Themes
Off the top of my head, the themes will include:
What?
Context: turbulent times past and present - there are lessons
How organisations work (and don't) - relationship dynamics, power, culture, conflict, alliances, psychological needs, performance environments etc
Smart principles underpinning design for:
Viability (including emotional and psychological well-being)
Adaptability
Autonomy
Integration
Collaboration
Wirearchy
Distributed diversity
Collective intelligence
Social skills
Thinking skills
Leadership skills
Learning skills
Performance environments, including:
Cultural and social environment
Online place
Physical space
Whole system of leadership
How?
All this research and good practice that others have found effective in specific contexts and at specific times cannot be be copied or rolled out. What to do?
Draw out principles and interpret for your own situation
Create hypotheses about what is happening or what you want to happen
What might work?
What might enable or prev

So, after board meetings, we would assemble the company and go through every board slide. How much cash in the bank? What's our burn rate? What are the biggest problems we are facing? Did we decide to build, buy or acquire a critical component? The first couple of go-rounds, there was dead silence. No questions - just heads nodding and a couple of blank stares. After some probing, we realized that people needed to feel comfortable speaking up, that it didn't just come naturally. We brainstormed a bunch of different ways to get over this hurdle and here were some experiments that ultimately worked

Listen up, budding Masters of the Universe about to start boot-camp week at business school (and sign away $100,000 over two years). For all the wonderful instruction at places like Harvard, Wharton and my alma mater, the Stern School of Business at NYU, remember that making money involves so much more than columns in a spreadsheet and the ever shifting assumptions behind them. Keep in mind:

1. If it ain't broke, still fix it. One of the hardest decisions business owners have to make is turning their backs on cash when it's flowing. But that's exactly what you must have the courage to do at times to protect your franchise.

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2. Unless you end up at Goldman Sachs, forget what you learned about finance. "In a 12-year finance career with large respected companies," says one of my former classmates, who is finance chief for the unit of a large manufacturing firm, "I can count on two hands the number of IRR [internal rate of return], DCF [discounted cash flow] and NPV [net present value] analyses I have completed." He adds: "A career in corporate finance is nothing like what is taught in school. The job is largely to be the conscience of the business--expecting and demanding explanation for decisions and [being] well versed in most topics."

3. Take your financial models with a boulder of salt. "Too often people in business rely upon a model demonstrating projections out 15 to 30 years," says another biz-school mate, now a health care consultant. Really? In school we worked in more modest 3- to 5-year increments, with an understanding that anything beyond that was magical thinking. "Believe it or not," he went on, "I have seen some done out that far for deals [acquisitions] and often for public-private partnerships."

4. Overpromise and try to deliver. Underpromising and overdelivering may work on conference calls with Wall Stree

Jay Cross, Implementing eLearning