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:

The economic, social and environmental volatility now facing business means organisations having to operate in a dynamically transforming landscape.

The nature of change itself is transforming. Organisations are now increasingly exposed to dynamic change: change upon change upon change - while dealing with one change, another affects us, then another, and so on. This dynamic change upsets the traditional business paradigm we have been working to over the last few decades.

The BrainYard Lots of presentations

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.

Connected company case studies and examples
50 social media stories worth bookmarking

A collection of E20 case studies and examples

Cases in collaboration

DIA embraces E20

E2o examples and case stories

Peter Kim's wiki of social media examples

Socialtext case studies

ZDNet Zappos case study

Great article

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

The innovation premium is the proportion of a company's market value that cannot be accounted for from the net present value of cash flows of its current products in its current markets. Put another way, it's the premium the stock market gives a company because investors expect it to launch new offerings and enter new markets that will generate even bigger income streams. We use the innovation premium to rank the world's most innovative companies and this has prompted a number of questions about the methodology.

Innovation is the lifeblood of our global economy and a strategic priority for all CEOs everywhere. We're all familiar with classic cases where revolutionary ideas upended industries and generated enormous wealth: the Apple iPod's outplaying the Sony Walkman; Starbucks' beans and atmosphere flooding out traditional coffee shops; Skype's using a strategy of "free" to unspool AT&T. But how about Reckitt Benckiser Group, the British consumer products giant (Lysol, Woolite, Clearasil), which looks to customers, among others, to find new methods to detect parasites?

Whole Service: Some service systems provide "whole service" to the people within them. For example, a city provides "whole service" for its citizens and visitors, including flow of things people need (e.g., transportation, water, food, energy, communications), development activities for people (e.g., buildings, retail, finance, health, education), and governance (e.g., laws, security, dispute resolution, etc.). To a lesser degree, but similar in kind, a luxury cruise-ship provides "whole service" to its passengers. Even old-time homestead farms and ranches, because they had to sustain families and hired hands sometimes over multiple generations with minimal external inputs, are to some degree providing "whole service" to those people living within them.

Holistic Service Systems: To first approximation, the study of holistic service systems is concerned with how well these entities provide "whole service" to the people within them. Whole service deals with a conjunction of three types of service, namely (1) flow of things people need, (2) development activities for people, and (3) governance for individuals and institutions. A holistic service system is defined as "a service system that can support the people within it, with some level of (1) completeness (quality of life associated with whole service - flows, development, and governance), (2) independence (from all external service systems),and (3) extended duration (longer than a month if necessary and in some cases indefinitely)." Noteworthy levels of completeness, independence, and extended duration of "whole service" are the three defining properties of holistic service systems.

alternative performance reviews

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

Leading Outside the Lines: How to Mobilize the (In)Formal Organization, Energize Your Team, and Get Better Results, by Jon R. Katzenbach, a senior partner at Booz & Company, which publishes strategy+business, and Zia Khan, vice president for strategy and evaluation at the Rockefeller Foundation. They take a much more fine-grained approach to managing that is based on finding the right combination of the "logic of the formal" and the "magic of the informal."

In the three-part book, the authors focus on how individual managers can use informal connections and conversations to enhance the formal incentives and structures of a company - and, in the process, motivate individual performance and mobilize organizational change. Managers who can draw on both the formal and the informal as required have a high "organizational quotient" (OQ). This is a combination of intelligence quotient (IQ) and emotional intelligence (EQ) that balances disciplined and spontaneous actions, and rational and emotional thinking, depending on the demands of the situation.

The objective is consilience, which literally means a jumping together of the formal and the informal, a creative integration of "both...and" that harks back to Mary Parker Follett, the early-20th-century pioneer of organizational theory. This is the first of several evocative metaphors that the authors use to describe one of the most desirable but elusive phenomena in organizational life - those times when decisions, actions, and emotions jibe with strategic intent, when dynamic routines are constantly being improved upon, when employees are proud of their company, and when the company as well as the members of its ecosystem (partners, suppliers, and customers) all succeed.

Katzenbach and Khan stress that a managerial focus on the informal is not just a matter of being nice. People work and perform much better when they are treated with care and respect as individuals. The c

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Terrence Garguilo on telling stories as a leadership competency.