21CLeadership

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

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.

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

We've kept things as simple as possible to help you find the tips you need, when you need them. The articles have been split into three main categories:

for tips to improve your personal effectiveness at work.

containing hints and tips to help you manage your team.

to develop your interpersonal, writing and presentation skills.

Terrence Garguilo on telling stories as a leadership competency.

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?

Avoid a meeting if the same information could be covered in a memo, e-mail or brief report. One of the keys to having more effective meetings is differentiating between the need for one-way information dissemination and two-way information sharing. Like: after action report.

Tiffany Schlain's film, Connected. Trailer, video, 2.31

50 well made short videos of business leaders giving advice

Aart de Geus, video 5:07

Warren Bennis, video 4:18

IBM presentation on why you should use social software. presentation, 24 minutes. VItamins or aspirin? Social software is an aspirin: it cures corporate headaches. Profiles, tags, social bookmarks

Jane & Jane