Right now the demand for access to learning is rising like the average temperature throughout the globe, flooding traditional institutional capacity. At the same time the web offers all-new possibilities for how we can both connect and share information. How can the practitioners of the open-source software movement develop and share new tools and practices to foster learning? What are the most successful ways to supplement and to replace the traditional university's functions of knowledge transmission, socialization, and accreditation? How does openness function as a philosophy as well as a tactic to move forward the frontiers of learning and knowledge discovery?

REX is the Relationship Economy eXpedition. The next social and industrial order has more to do with abundance and trust than with scarcity and stickiness. The key assets are trusted relationships. Here we'll build key elements of the Relationship Economy, playing out what it means for business, culture, society, governance, education and more, because its effects will be far-reaching.

Permanent Rule: You may not play the Calvinball the same way twice. Primary Rule: The following rules are subject to be changed, amended, or deleted by any player(s) involved. These rules are not required, nor necessary to play Calvinball. 1.0. The following words in these rules are mostly freely interchangeable, the Primary Rule applies: Can May Must Shall Should Will Would

Our Work
Looking over the edge
Our work seeks to link the latest academic thinking from thought leaders across a variety of disciplines with the operational challenges and experiences of the members. The outcome is innovative service models, strategies, practices and standards that are operational.
To accomplish this, the Consortium hosts a number of activities the core of which are the Team Meetings. The Team Meetings are working sessions on specific topics. The speed with which the Consortium's work progresses is a function of the member's courage to try new and un-proven ideas. The Team Meetings are the place where we discuss these emerging ideas and learn from the members experiences.

Here are five things that people introducing new technology to help collaboration should think about:

People in your organization already collaborate.
Not everyone likes to share.
Email is not going away.
People need to collaborate outside as well as inside the enterprise.
No single piece of technology will satisfy all types of collaboration.

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.

Question: What does Oprah Winfrey have in common with World War II General George S. Patton? Answer: Being an avid diarist.

Recently, Oprah offered her readers glimpses into her diaries, along with encouragement to keep their own. Many well-known figures throughout history, from John Adams to Andy Warhol, have faithfully kept records of their daily lives. Undoubtedly, some have had an eye toward history in their devotion to journaling. But aside from the shot at immortality, are there any real benefits of keeping a diary?

There are. In particular, there are four reasons for keeping a work diary: (1) focus, (2) patience, (3) planning, and (4) personal growth.

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

Zenger and Folkman admit that the flaws seem obvious ones that any leader would try to fix. But they found that ineffective leaders were often unaware of their flaws. The authors suggest that leaders need to take a hard look at themselves and should seek candid feedback on their performance. I believe that simple awareness of what constitutes effective leadership behaviors and how one is performing on them may not be adequate for improvement. In this article, I suggest an intervention that might work for you.

Specifically, I focus on the following:

The knowing-doing gap;
Closing the knowing-doing gap;
Goal-setting as a simple intervention;
The power of goal-setting;
Preventing relapse with email reminders to yourself;

Over the last couple of weeks there have been a number of rather interesting and insightful blog posts that have been covering IBM's journey to become a social business. A journey that started back in 2001, but that it had its main roots well substantiated within the company for much longer. Interestingly enough, when everyone was starting to think about going social within the enterprise, IBM had already well established, and recognised, since May 2005, the well known Social Computing Guidelines that soon became an industry standard in setting up a reliable and trustworthy governance model and guidelines for knowledge workers to engage with both internal and external social networking tools. However, fast forward to 2011 and I still get asked, every so often, how is IBM doing in the social business space, not just from a vendor perspective, but also from its own internal social transformation. Are we there yet? Have we already made that transition successfully? What has been the experience like so far?

Well, I could probably summarise it all with a single sentence at this point in time: It's been a long journey, indeed! We have learned a lot, we have become much more efficient and effective at what we do, but we still have got lots more to be done! Like for almost everyone out there, becoming a social business is a tough job, for sure, we are not discovering anything new in there, there needs to be a significant cultural shift, a change of mindset, a change on how we do and conduct business, but the good thing is that the trip to provoke such social transformation has been worth while all the way coming from a Globally Integrated Enterprise into a Socially Integrated Enterprise (a.k.a. SIE)

The truth is that everyone is, indeed, a community facilitator / manager nowadays, as you saw in a recent blog entry where I referenced Gautam's comments along these very same lines. So I thought I would develop further on this topic, specially since, earlier on today, I bumped into a couple of rather relevant and interesting links very much connected to this topic that I am sure you would enjoy quite a bit. The first one is coming from my good friend, Gautam Ghosh, once again, who earlier on tweeted a link to a blog post that he put together in September 2010 and which, despite the months gone by already, it's just as valid today, if not more!, than ever before. Have a look into "5 Skills for Online Community Managers" and find out what some of the community facilitator traits would be like, according to him…

The top five reasons I see projects fail are (1) No slack in the system (2) Managing for the knowns (3) Not limiting work-in-progress (4) Political promises and (5) Sloppy communication.  Let's examine these:

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

Ignite is a rapid-fire form of presentation. The presenter must present 20 slides in 5 minutes. Every 15 seconds a new slide advances automatically. It is amazing how much information one can cover in 5 minutes if you boil the message down to essence. It takes me longer to prepare a 5-minute Ignite session than a one-hour presentation. And I suspect people retain more information when I've finished, too. Talk about making meetings efficient. Watch some of these and give it a try.

A collection of frameworks and figures from Altimeter Research, see more at Altimetergroup.com. Fantastic insight into all manner of networks and social business.

A site where you can set up a goal and monitor your progress.

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...