statistics about our changing world. There are for more interesting numbers and resources than I could ever reference so I'm creating this post (which will get revised over time) to point you to their sources.

The Future Of All Work, And Not Just For Creatives Posted on May 13, 2011 by Stowe Boyd Richard Florida wrote recently about trends in employment in the US, which indicates the nature of work in the decades to come, or the possible shape of the future of work.

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?

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.

greg

Dave Snowden

Donald's contrarian and practical viewpoint on how people learn.

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.

Ross Dawson, the new functions

important: management practice

In more complex terms, interaction design is a discipline that borrows from product, industrial, graphic, interface and web design, as well as cognitive psychology, human computer interaction, computer science, information communication technology (ICT)-and architecture. Interaction design is never the same thing in two different places. As many histories of interaction design exist as there are disciplines that borrow from them.

Steve Denning has a great take --  and lots of material on "radical management." That's very 21C.

In the midst of an economic downturn, it's easy to fixate on cyclical events and lose sight of deeper trends and long-term changes. The Shift Index, a macroeconomic report created by Deloitte LLP's Center for the Edge, suggests that the current economic turmoil is masking long-term competitive challenges for U.S. businesses.  The 2010 Shift Index Report updates the metrics we provided last year and goes deeper into some of the underlying dynamics.

a synthesis of the thinking in a whole host of recent management books that propose the reinvention of management

Scrum is a simple, team-based framework for solving complex problems. Scrum encourages common sense, direct communication and rapid self-improvement among the stakeholders. Although Scrum was originally created for software projects, nothing in Scrum is specific to software.

What is This List of Lenses? The list is essentially what I have been using and building upon for 15 years dealing with social software and the hurdles and headaches that can come from it. These 40 plus lenses (sometimes nearly 50) are questions, models, and frameworks I use when working with clients or in workshops.