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InsideOut Development founder, Alan Fine, began his career as a tennis coach working with up-and-coming tennis professionals. As he worked with athletes, he realized that the biggest performance challenge wasn't that people didn't know what to do, but rather that they didn't do what they know. In other words, performance breakthroughs come from the inside out.

From these experiences, in mid- to late-1980, Fine and two other collaborators, Graham Alexander and Sir John Whitmore, developed the GROW Model--one of the world's most recognized and influential coaching models today.

GROW is an acronym representing the four core components in any significant decision-making process. The meanings of the first three letters are shared by all major iterations of the model. "G" represents the "Goal" the individual seeks to achieve; "R", the "Realities" a person should consider in the context of the decision process; and "O", the "Options" open to the decision-maker. "W" has been interpreted in a variety of ways. But Fine defined it as "Way Forward"--a specific action plan that he feels maximizes the precision and proactivity of the GROW Model.

As we enter the 21st century, the role of "alpha persons" is very much in question. No doubt traditional leadership (and traditionally minded books on how to lead) will continue. But the following seem the best predictions as to how the concept of leadership will develop:     Leadership is for everyone.  No doubt some people are better flutists than others, but almost everyone can learn to play the flute. In the modern organization, everyone is a team member and every one is a project manager. So everyone needs to learn and to exhibit leadership.      Leadership involves learning.  The leader is one who uncovers new knowledge and knows how to share it with others. More than ever before, knowledge is truly power. More than ever before, leadership will be shown by spreading learning.

Furthermore, we've found that contrary to what many CEOs assume, leadership is not really about delegating tasks and monitoring results; it is about imbuing the entire workforce with a sense of responsibility for the business. This applies mainly to knowledge organizations, but even production-oriented companies can benefit from having employees who feel more empowered and engaged.

If abdication of authority is to yield value for the corporation, however, individuals must be self-motivated. CSC Germany does this by allowing employees to work on the one of five topics that best utilizes their talents and excites their interest. This involves joining a topic community, such as the one focusing on strategy and innovation. Issues are discussed in these groups until all participants come to an agreement, and leadership within the groups shifts frequently, settling on individuals who have the most competence in the areas of focus and are accepted by others as leaders.

We call such practices "mutualism." It involves measuring workers not against revenue or other numerical goals, which we have observed to be ineffective as motivational tools, but against qualitative values such as trust, responsibility, and innovation. And it implies that leaders don't dictate vision or strategy; instead, they enable employees to create a common vision through, for example, off-sites for discussion of strategic issues and regular feedback and education. Hitting numerical goals has been the natural outcome.

Relaxation of control can benefit any knowledge company, but particularly in certain circumstances: when the organization begins to miss opportunities because it can't understand or respond to market demands; when work is impaired because employees feel excessively pressured and harbor dissatisfaction; and when crises imperil the business. Then mutualism is the best way to unleash the power of employees' creativity.

We call such practices "mutualism." It involves measuring workers not against revenue or other numerical goals, which we have observed to be ineffective as motivational tools, but against qualitative values such as trust, responsibility, and innovation. And it implies that leaders don't dictate vision or strategy; instead, they enable employees to create a common vision through, for example, off-sites for discussion of strategic issues and regular feedback and education. Hitting numerical goals has been the natural outcome.

Four pillars of collaborative leadership

Today's myriad interconnected social networks - Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter etc - mean that most people are already connected in a collaborative way to others beyond their traditional domain. It's a question of how to leverage that in the office. In their HBR article, Ibarra and Hansen suggest four pillars:

1. Play global connector. "The first piece is really how you yourself build a network that allows you to add value collaboratively because you can connect," says Ibarra. "If you are stuck in your function, in your group, in your business unit, in your country, how can you see what's going on out there? How can you see the array of opportunities that could be passing you by?"

2. Engage talent at the periphery. "How do you think about the talent that you are bringing to the table?" Ibarra asks. "Everybody espouses the value of diversity, but saying it and doing it are very different things. We see very clearly that leaders who engage talent from the periphery - and that periphery could be geographical or generational or gender diversity - are going to be much better placed to collaborate."

3. Collaborate at the top first. "A lot of times, collaborations get mired in politics, or groups have great ideas that don't get accepted because the top is divided politically into turf wars," points out Ibarra. "You cannot encourage collaboration on the front line and then not collaborate with each other as a top team."

4. Show a strong hand. "Collaboration doesn't mean consensus on everything," says Ibarra. At some point, the discussion has to end and someone has to make a decision. "You need to understand as a leader when you step back, and then when you do come back in make sure people know who's got the right to make the final decision."

There is a deep gulf between the sterile, one-way and almost Orwellian practices of the corporate IT network and the rapidly-evolving, chaotic organism of today's Intranet.

What would it look like if the social world of Web 2.0 collided with the corporate Intranet? What would happen if information was disseminated from outside in, instead of inside out; from the people working on the front line? This is precisely what an interesting experiment at global consulting firm Capgemini is revealing. Many of the company's 110,000 people are based on site at client locations and it is here that 'real-world' challenges must be addressed. The IT consultants in particular, who form about half of the workforce, are in an environment where the information they use goes out of date very quickly.

To help keep its teams up-to-speed, and to stay on top of the disruptive changes in their operating environment, Capgemini began a few years ago experimenting with Yammer, a private and secure enterprise social network that allows colleagues to hold conversations, read posts and actively collaborate with their co-workers in real-time. CTO Andy Mulholland says that it is contributing to the "collective consciousness of the 20,000 people who subscribe to Yammer internally."

Management's changing role. Capgemini uses Yammer for: aligning activities, problem solving, information sharing, providing clarification. Now think about the things managers do for a living - and you quickly end up with a pretty similar list. Social networking technologies, in other words, are increasingly being used to provide the support and input that employees used to get from their managers. This frees up managers, in turn, to spend more time on the real value-added work - such as motivating their employees, structuring their work to make it more engaging, developing their skills, securing access to resources, and making linkages to other parts of the organisation. Warren Buffett is famous for saying that it is only when the tide goes out that you can see who is swimming naked, and the same metaphor applies here: when employees can get all the basic support they need for their work through Yammer, rather than through their line manager, the real qualities of the line manager are exposed and some are found wanting.  

By RACHEL EMMA SILVERMAN

The status-update era is changing the annual performance review.


Peter and Maria Hoey
With many younger workers used to instant feedback-from text messages to Facebook and Twitter updates-annual reviews seem too few and far between. So companies are adopting quarterly, weekly or even daily feedback sessions.

Not surprisingly, Facebook Inc. exemplifies the trend. The social network's 2,000 employees are encouraged to solicit and give small nuggets of feedback regularly, after meetings, presentations and projects. "You don't have to schedule time with someone. It's a 45-second conversation-'How did that go? What could be done better?" says Lori Goler, the Palo Alto, Calif., social-networking company's vice president of human resources. More formal reviews happen twice a year.

For most companies, employee reviews are still an annual rite of passage. Some 51% of companies conduct formal performance reviews annually, while 41% of firms do semi-annual appraisals, according to a 2011 survey of 500 companies by the Corporate Executive Board Co., a research and advisory firm.

And increasing frequency may not make much of a difference if the performance appraisals are ineffective to begin with, say some. One academic review of more than 600 employee-feedback studies found that two-thirds of appraisals had zero or even negative effects on employee performance after the feedback was given. "Why is doing something stupid more often better than doing something stupid once a year?" asks Samuel A. Culbert, a professor at the Anderson School of Management at the University of California, Los Angeles and the co-author of the book "Get Rid of the Performance Review!"

Some firms have found that the traditional once-a-year review is so flooded with information-appraising past performance, setting future goals, discussing pay-that workers have trouble absorbing it all, and inst

Most of us know the answers to our problems most of the time deep down. We just don't always articulate them even to ourselves. Even if the solution appears to be out of our direct control, sitting down and thinking about how you are going to convey the problem, or the solution, to say for instance your boss has to be the first step. Blogging is a great trigger to doing this. If your blog is visible to others you will probably have to abstract the problem to avoid compromising others involved in the situation but this abstraction is partly what helps. It helps to depersonalise things and get to the root of what is really happening.

IN medicine, the evidence-based movement arose in response to thousands of deaths and billions of wasted dollars that could have been averted by applying proven practices. Similarly, in other fields, the growing pile of studies on the human and financial costs of employee disengagement, management distrust, poor group dynamics, faulty incentive schemes and other preventable damage suggests a need for an evidence-based management movement. Some organizations are leading the way. It's time for many more to follow suit.  

This is post 1 in a series about preparing for the future of work and learning. When you jump into a heated pool or get into a warm lake in the middle of a hot day- this usually feels nice, right? What about when you jump into an unheated pool or a cold lake? Is it usually a gets your attention, even if you knew the water was cold. When you think about the future of work, did it ever make you feel like you were jumping into cold water?  If not, you probably haven't considered what this means for you.  It's a big change. Most of us are experiencing the changing workplace environment at some level while others are fully immersed. In order to build your skills or the skills of others for work of the future, you need to understand how the future of work is changing. Here are 19 Resources to help to gain a better understanding of this change.

I forked yesterday for the first time. I'm pretty thrilled. Not about the few lines of code that I posted. If anyone notices and thinks the feature is a good idea, they'll re-write my bit from the ground up.* What's thrilling is seeing this ecology in operation, for the software development ecology is now where the most rapid learning happens on the planet, outside the brains of infants.
Compare how ideas and know-how used to propagate in the software world. It used to be that you worked in a highly collaborative environment, so it was already a site of rapid learning. But the barriers to sharing your work beyond your cube-space were high. You could post to a mailing list or UseNet if you had permission to share your company's work, you could publish an article, you could give a talk at a conference. Worse, think about how you would learn if you were not working at a software company or attending college: Getting answers to particular questions - the niggling points that hang you up for days - was incredibly frustrating. I remember spending much of a week trying to figure out how to write to a file in Structured BASIC [SBASIC], my first programming language , eventually cold-calling a computer science professor at Boston University who politely could not help me. I spent a lot of time that summer learning how to spell "Aaaaarrrrrggggghhhhh."
On the other hand, this morning Antonio, who is doing some work for the Library Innovation Lab this summer, poked his head in and pointed us to a jquery-like data visualization library. D3 makes it easy for developers to display data interactively on Web pages (the examples are eye-popping), and the author, mbostock, made it available for free to everyone. So, global software productivity just notched up. A bunch of programs just got easier to use, or more capable, or both. But more than that, if you want to know how to do how mbostock did it, you can read the code. If you want to modify it, you will learn deeply from

The general principles of this rapid-learning ecology are pretty clear. First, we probably have about the same number of smart people as we did twenty years ago, so what's making us all smarter is that we're on a network together. Second, the network has evolved a culture in which there's nothing wrong with not knowing. So we ask. In public. Third, we learn in public. Fourth, learning need not be private act that occurs between a book and a person, or between a teacher and a student in a classroom. Learning that is done in public also adds to that public. Fifth, show your work. Without the "show source" button on browsers, the ability to create HTML pages would have been left in the hands of HTML Professionals. Sixth, sharing is learning is sharing. Holy crap but the increased particularity of our ownership demands about our ideas gets in the way of learning! Knowledge once was developed among small networks of people. Now knowledge is the network.

Following are my getting back to basics recommendations: Face reality that email is not going away.  It has 100% utilization for employee collaboration & communication.   It becomes an epicenter for collaboration. The ability to post social content, receive notifications, receive activity digests must tie into email and SMS.  If your activity stream could fit into an Outlook window - even better. Recognize that collaboration doesn't just happen inside your company's walls.  Collaboration crosses many boundaries from time, distance and corporate firewalls.  Employees are using multiple tools and multiple networks both outside & inside.  Adding one more tool to the mix doesn't make life easier. Consider deploying a content/collaboration aggregator to simplify employee's ability to manage various content flows & networks both inside & outside the firewall (Example: Xobni Enterprise) Collaboration is now form factor agnostic: No longer is one device utilized.  Content & collaboration needs to flow across whatever mobile, tablet, desktop, laptop- eventually smart TV device - that an employee utilizes. Ubiquitous collaboration needs equal opportunity.  For example, If employees can get email, internet access, Facebook, Twitter on their mobile devices but only access social collaboration on their laptop- then those most available will be the top collaborative tools.  Your internal social platform needs equal access, otherwise it will continue to be Cinderella locked in the attic during the royal ball. Your intranet should be one in the same with your social platform.  If an official portal is the place to get news, updates & find information - your social platform must seamlessly be an integral part of that experience.  Don't ship off your employees to a separate site to socially engage & collaborate. The intranet should become the personalized collaborative workspace for employees "one stop shopping." Rid yourself of multiple employee prof

The big failure of social business is a lack of integration of social tools into the collaborative workflow.  

This is not a newly identified problem.  Those of us working on social collaboration efforts for a while recognized that integration is imperative from the beginning.  At the beginning, I clearly outlined integration as one of three foundational pillars for our strategy.  Unfortunately, various forces created challenges in this space. Social collaboration applications have been immature in this area for years (even after fierce calls for faster integration- i.e. CMS). Enterprises faced fork lift integration efforts to knit applications together.  Fork lift efforts get the budget axe when push comes to shove.  We managed to do the normal IT deployment model - the very model I fiercely advocated for us not to do.  We deployed just another tool amongst a minefield of other collaborative tools - without integration.   To make it even harder, we underinvested in transition change management.

Scrum in 1 minute
Scrum is about getting back to the time when the company was small and everything was easy and ran smoothly. Back then projects were small, teams were small, releases were small and communication was easy. Best of all, we were efficient.

In Scrum we split our big project into small projects as we work on timeboxed iterations called sprints. We split our big team into small teams (still with all the skills we need) and launch often. If we are more than 20 employees we probably have a problem knowing what the other departments and customers are needing so let's bring someone into the team that can represent them. To help communications from the team to the rest of the company we have our plan and current status visible. The plan is called the sprint backlog and the status is shown on the scrum board. Here is an example:

We will continue to focus relentlessly on our customers. * We will continue to make investment decisions in light of long-term market leadership considerations rather than short-term profitability considerations or short-term Wall Street reactions. * We will continue to measure our programs and the effectiveness of our investments analytically, to jettison those that do not provide acceptable returns, and to step up our investment in those that work best. We will continue to learn from both our successes and our failures.* We will make bold rather than timid investment decisions where we see a sufficient probability of gaining market leadership advantages. Some of these investments will pay off, others will not, and we will have learned another valuable lesson in either case. * When forced to choose between optimizing the appearance of our GAAP accounting and maximizing the present value of future cash flows, we'll take the cash flows. * We will share our strategic thought processes with you when we make bold choices (to the extent competitive pressures allow), so that you may evaluate for yourselves whether we are making rational long-term leadership investments. * We will work hard to spend wisely and maintain our lean culture. We understand the importance of continually reinforcing a cost-conscious culture, particularly in a business incurring net losses. * We will balance our focus on growth with emphasis on long-term profitability and capital management. At this stage, we choose to prioritize growth because we believe that scale is central to achieving the potential of our business model. * We will continue to focus on hiring and retaining versatile and talented employees, and continue to weight their compensation to stock options rather than cash. We know our success will be largely affected by our ability to attract and retain a motivated employee base, each of whom must think like, and therefore must actually be, an owner

The 50

From speaking to friends, colleagues and recalling my own experiences I've complied The 50, a list of 50 things I believe every graphic design student should know on leaving college. Some of these points are obvious, others less so - but all are brief, digestible nuggets of wisdom that will hopefully go some way to making the transition from graduate to designer a little bit smoother.

Share the 50

The 50 has been crafted to be shared, spread and debated. Each point has been synthesised into just 140 characters (complete with a #the50 hash-tag) making them memorable and Twitter-friendly. Tweet your favourites, share them on Facebook, and send this URL to your friends - The 50 needs to be seen by as many students as possible - because feedback is crucial for the next step…

Thomas Van Der Wal. Social Tools Need to Embrace Granularity What we have is partial likes in others and their interests and offerings. Our social tools have yet to grasp this and the few that do have only taken small steps to get there (I am rather impressed with Jaiku and their granular listening capability for their feed aggregation, which should be the starting point for all feed aggregators). Part of grasping the problem is a lack of quickly understanding the complexity, which leads to deconstructing and getting to two variables: 1) people (their identities online and their personas on various services) and 2) interests. These two elements and their combinations can (hopefully) be seen in the quick annotated video of one of my slides I have been using in presentations and workshops lately.

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

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

When I ask Hamilton, skeptically, if it is possible to conduct a conventional business meeting in a virtual environment, he answers that of course you can - but why would you? He is convinced that the zaniness of virtual environments plus the steep learning curve of making your avatar function from a keyboard is an effective icebreaker, especially important when partners need to overcome differences in cultural traditions, languages, work ethics, and political systems in order to complete a project together. Second Life's oddities lend an improvisational quality to interactions that it's harder to achieve in formal business meetings. "Playing in a band I learned that you need to leave spaces for others to fill," Hamilton insists. "Given this opportunity, people step into the gap. Talented teams connect, commingle and co-create."