21CLeadership

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

The cycle of serendipity (or not) came to me while having coffee yesterday with Valdis Krebs: "what you know depends a lot on who you know which depends a lot on what you know which depends a lot on who you know"…iteratively.  If you stay within those confines, your network remains fairly constant and self-selected.  Your chances of learning something new, of encountering 'happy accidents' is reduced, perhaps not zero, but not high.  It's when you venture outside of that circle that your network, and knowledge, starts to expand - you 'know' more people so you 'learn' more which leads to knowing more people and on and on. As I reflect upon how I know what I know, almost all of that knowledge & network has been serendipitous - Random Collisions of Unusual Suspects (#RCUS), to quote Saul Kaplan.   Let's look at Random (and then examine the other words over the next few weeks before BIF-7).  The OED defines Random as "Having no definite aim or purpose; not sent or guided in a particular direction; made, done, occurring, etc., without method or conscious choice; haphazard."  Originating in the 14th Century with an unclear origin, it meant impetuosity, sudden speed, violence.  In the mid 17th Century, it took on the meaning of haphazard, from the Old French randon (v. randir "run impetuously, fast") from the Frankish rant "running" from the prehistoric German randa.  But here's where I think it gets very interesting.  Originally, randa meant 'edge' - which lead the English rand, an obsolete term for 'edge' (now the South African currency).[2] It is this last, or very very early, meaning of 'edge' that intrigues me.  Innovation, especially disruptive innovation, comes from the edges, from the fringes.  So, for the next week or so, just try to put yourself in Random situations - situations that are not planned, not directed and even perhaps at the edge of your usual business or personal world and see what

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