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Keeping an organization performing is a constant battle. Every organization is trying to overcome its inertia, to gain momentum, and to become more productive. This battle with inertia means there is constant change-change that people often resist, deny, and frequently become angry about.Ultimately, everyone in the organization wants higher performance. This occurs at its highest levels in spite of resistance to change when people are clear what their team or personal goals are; understand the business outcome that their team or personal goals contribute to; and ensure that each task they do supports these goals. One way to raise the performance of an organization is to help all individuals become more efficient and effective in their daily tasks. Historically, leaders have tried to develop this effectiveness and efficiency in their people by using two approaches: A command-and-control approach: Controllers lead their people as if they are herding sheep. Their mind-set is to train their people well enough to be able to control them. It works, but it costs a lot of time and energy. A knowledge-based approach: It is often assumed that if people have more information, they will be able to do things better based on that information. This is the organizational equivalent of reading a book on golf and expecting to be able to play at the level of a professional. More often than not, it is not a lack of knowledge that blocks performance, but a lack of consistent, accurate implementation of the knowledge that people already have that blocks individuals, teams, and organizations from performing at their best. People in organizations are rarely stupid, but they often suffer interference that blocks their performance.

The 8 Step Process for Leading Change

30 years of research by leadership guru Dr. John Kotter have proven that 70% of all major change efforts in organizations fail. Why do they fail? Because organizations often do not take the holistic approach required to see the change through.

However, by following the 8 Step Process outlined by Professor Kotter, organizations can avoid failure and become adept at change. By improving their ability to change, organizations can increase their chances of success, both today and in the future. Without this ability to adapt continuously, organizations cannot thrive.

In my last blog post on connected companies, complex systems, and social intranets, I wrote a little bit about the appropriateness of mechanical metaphors and models in complex times. While I never used the term explicitly the competing metaphor to the mechanical, which Ephraim picked up on in his comments, is the organic.

* Networks provide the underlying structure to a massive part of life and the universe * That network structure applies on many levels, including our brains, the internet (and the collective intelligence it is catalyzing), applications, organizations, and business ecosystems * We can usefully think of these networks as sometimes literally coming to life * The key factors that enable networks at the societal and organizational levels to come to life are Connectivity, Standards, Integration, and Structure * Organizations need to be balanced between structure and chaos to create the conditions for agility, responsiveness, and success * Business ecosystems are central to value creation today, yet require rich flows of information that are predicated on trust and effective strategies for spanning organizational boundaries * Applications are themselves networks, coming to life through modularity, distributed architecture and development, and integration with human processes, thus supporting the living networks of organizations and business ecosystems

Company Overview
The Creative Leadership Forum Learning Centre is a global management consultancy specialising in the benchmarking, measuring and development of creative behaviors for organizational value.

Committed to developing human capital in organizations, the Creative Leadership Forum Learning Centre collaborates with its clients to help them realize their organizations' visions to create tangible value.

With deep expertise in management innovation and a broad global network of academics and practitioners with proven experience in consulting in this space, the Creative Leadership Forum Learning Centre can mobilize the right people, skills, alliances to realise your organization's key drivers for success.

Using the theories of organizational economics and its own unique IP, the Creative Leadership Forum Learning Centre benchmarks and measures the key elements of the organization's key drivers for success - its management innovation infrastructure and its creative ecology.

The overview   

Provides a holistic view of the organization as a creative system
Benchmarks the organization's management innovation capabilities and capacities in that syste
Identifies critical areas with potential for development and improvement
Recommends and delivers interventions to drive value, success and growth.

Today, the overriding problem for every organization is how to change, deeply and continually, and at an accelerating pace. We live in a world where change is "shaken, not stirred." Yet in most organizations, practices and structures reflexively favor the status quo over change and renewal. We see entire industries-for example, pharmaceuticals, music, advertising, and publishing-where the incumbents are struggling to invent their way out of slowly dying business models.

While there isn't one right culture, just as culture is tough to compare across organizations, there are certain common elements of organizations that do well with these types of initiatives. Charlene Li sums it up best: "be open, be transparent, be authentic".

Rachel Happe has written a compelling vision of what the future of work may look like, in a recent post, and it seems that her thoughts about the increasing autonomy of workers in an increasingly free agent world [my comments embedded in brackets]: So what might this organizational nirvana look like? Employment becomes a cross between a long-term commitment and free-agency: The organization provides employee overhead (benefits) in exchange for a commitment to work a minimum number of hours on organizational projects.

This is the classic! In "How to Make Meetings Work, Michael Doyle wrote a very useful and comprehensive book on guiding people on how to plan, organize and run effective and productive meetings. The book is well written in an easy to follow and understand style. It helped me to discard the notion that meetings are a waste of time and money and learnt how they can be very useful for an organization. Among the important tips that the author highlighted are the importance of having a clear agenda distributed in advance of the meeting, having a clear purpose of the meeting, clarity on the type of meeting being held (e.g. whether it is a planning meeting, for decision making, feedback etc), adequate preparation by all participants, participation in discussions by all those present at a meeting, importance of starting and ending on time, the need to stick to the agenda, summarizing action items and resolving conflicts that may arise. The book also provides insights into meeting leadership skills.

The Ten-Year Forecast Program provides a distinctive outlook on the changing global environment for a vanguard of players in business, government, and nonprofit organizations. Focusing on the next three to ten years, the program anticipates discontinuities and emerging dilemmas--discontinuities because they challenge business as usual and dilemmas because they demand new ways of thinking about complex problems. Together, discontinuities and dilemmas provide a vista of new practices and points of view that will shape tomorrow's organizations and today's choices.  

  Kathi Vian | Director, Ten-Year Forecast Program

This question came up in an online seminar this morning. "How can I demonstrate the value of Informal Learning?"

First of all, understand that you're not buying informal learning. It's already going on in your organization. In fact, three-quarters of the learning on and about how to do one's job is informal.

The natural learning that occurs outside of classes and workshops is vital but it probably flies under your corporate radar. No manager is accountable; no department is committed to making improvements; there's no identifiable budget. Hence, one of the most important functions in an organization, keeping up with skills to prosper in the future, is left largely to chance.

Tom Friedman has penned a thought-provoking oped, "One Country, Two Revolutions."

In discussing the ongoing social media revolution underway in Silicon Valley, Friedman turns to 21st century leadership:

Marc Benioff, the founder of Salesforce.com, a cloud-based software provider, describes this phase of the I.T. revolution with the acronym SOCIAL. S, he says, is for speed - everything is now happening faster. O, he says, stands for open. If you don't have an open environment inside your company or country, these new tools will blow you wide open. C is for collaboration because this revolution enables people to organize themselves within companies and societies into loosely coupled teams to take on any kind of challenges - from designing a new product to taking down a government. I is for individuals, who are able to reach around the globe to start something or collaborate on something farther, faster, deeper, cheaper than ever before - as individuals.

Preview Gary Hamel's February 2009 article in the Harvard Business Review, Moon Shots for Management.In May 2008, a group of renowned scholars and business leaders gathered in Half Moon Bay, California, with a simple goal: to lay out an agenda for reinventing management in the 21st century. The two-day event, organized by the Management Lab with support from McKinsey & Company, brought together veteran management experts such as CK Prahalad, Henry Mintzberg, and Peter Senge

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi talks about flow as being in the moment. What does this really mean? How might it be relevant for the day to day challenges of organizational life?

How do we move in organizations? Do we give into tides of constraints dotting the shores with recognizable successes and failures? How do we discern the faint melodies of possibilities offered by shifts of how and who we are… and what place should we assume in the ecological menagerie of conditions, gifts, talents and opportunities enlightening our constellations?

Story-based tactics, processes and tools help us probe the complexity of organizational life.

Executives at the more highly networked companies in our survey reported that they captured a broad set of benefits from their Web investments. A key question remained, however: do these benefits translate into fundamental performance improvements, measured by self-reported market share gains and higher profits?

Twitter for Business Whatever the size of your organization, make the most of Twitter.

It's time to think about what companies really are, and to design with that in mind. Companies are not so much machines as complex, dynamic, growing systems. As they get larger, acquiring smaller companies, entering into joint ventures and partnerships, and expanding overseas, they become "systems of systems" that rival nation-states in scale and reach. So what happens if we rethink the modern company, if we stop thinking of it as a machine and start thinking of it as a complex, growing system? What happens if we think of it less like a machine and more like an organism? Or even better, what if we compared the company with other large, complex human systems, like, for example, the city?

The sooner workers are productive, the larger their contribution to the organization. This makes time-to-performance, the amount of time required to begin performing at target levels, a vital metric. Here's an example.

At the end of the last century, Sun Microsystems was a high-flier in the workstation business. Sun was bringing 120 new salespeople a month to a one-week immersion course in Santa Clara. The new hires went through briefings on equipment, applications, competition, Sun, and more. Undoubtedly, most of this gusher of information pouring in one ear and out the other. Fifteen months later, the graduates were selling at quota: $5 million/year.

As enterprises gradually decentralize their operations and new networked business ecosystems start to find their way into profitable niche marketplaces, virtual, networked business teams gradually emerge as the wave of the future.

To be successful, virtual, networked business teams need a strategic framework in which to operate. They also need good planning and in-depth project analysis, effective and accessible technologies, constant coaching, systematic fine-tuning, feedback processes and the full understanding that their success cannot be determined by a pre-designated set of communication technologies by itself.

But, until now, projects supported by virtual business teams have not been brought back major successes. Virtual teams are having major problems and managing their progress has been a superlative challenge for most. Organizations face for the first time the need to analyze and comprehend which are the key obstacles to the successful management of effective online collaborative business networks. Though the answer is not simple, the solution is to be found in examples that are closer to us than we have yet realized.

Virtual collaboration for networked business teams is a complex and challenging activity in which there are major important components to be accounted for.

Virtual business teams DO NOT operate like traditional physical teams, as their requirements reflect a whole new way of communicating, working collaboratively, sharing information and mutually supporting other team members. The new technologies and approaches required to achieve this are completely alien to most of our present organizational culture. And this is why they fail.

Cooperative processes are not the automatic results of implementing collaborative, real-time communication technologies, but the result of a carefully designed and systematically maintained virtual team development plan.

For those of you who have alread

Welcome to the Complete QS Guide to Self-Tracking!
Here you will find tools, apps, and projects that are tagged, rated, and reviewed by the global Quantified Self community (that includes you!) This guide is funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Pioneer Portfolio, which supports bold ideas at the cutting edge of health and health care, in partnership with Institute for the Future. Our goal is to gather and organize the world's collective self-tracking resources in one place, in a way that is useful and encourages collaboration between self-tracking experts and beginners who are just starting out. Dive in now and explore some of the Tools or Members who are part of this site...