21CLeadership

The table in the report clearly shows how we are moving to an economy that values emotional intelligence, imagination and creativity. These data are almost a decade old, so just imagine how much further we are into the new economy.

Maybe your boss is nervous because he understands the potential of social media all too well. Once people learn that they can find each other, share their knowledge and work together the roles of many managers will change if not disappear. This is frightening. However the good managers will make the effort to adapt and will continue to add value in the more networked world we are moving into.  Many of them will be old enough to have children active on the web and may not be comfortable talking to them about it. Or they may get the point of social tools outside work but not see how to map them to the business context. Why not help them? Why not help your boss to understand the benefits for their business and them as individuals of getting to grips with the social network world? There is a real danger that we assume that our boss knows everything. Often they don't and may be embarrassed about admitting this. Make it easy for them to do so.

This question has implications for the superfluid platform… Should projects exist in perpetuity or should they be organized around a specific goal? How open or closed should projects be?  How fluid? What should be the defaults? Should 'sequels' be assumed or should they require an active reconstitution of a project team?

"When the number of committed opinion holders is below 10 percent, there is no visible progress in the spread of ideas. It would literally take the amount of time comparable to the age of the universe for this size group to reach the majority," said SCNARC Director Boleslaw Szymanski, the Claire and Roland Schmitt Distinguished Professor at Rensselaer. "Once that number grows above 10 percent, the idea spreads like flame."

The point is, it is the most interesting, attractive, high-margin work that spans boundaries and requires a network approach. Firms large and small can comfortably do process work internally, but to get the ground-breaking work they must learn to use open innovation and build external networks into the core of how they work.

Rather here's what I see: our institutions, far from evolving and improving, at the time we need to update them most, are actually moving backwards. We're taking tiny steps--and sometimes giant leaps--backwards in time, deconstructing the basic building blocks of civilization. Think I'm exaggerating? Then like most of our talking heads, pundits, and chatterati, you might need a tiny refresher course on what civilization and prosperity are yourself.

amplified individual Theme: the Amplified Individual Forecast Clusters: Highly - Collaborative, Social; Improvisational; Augmented Dilemma: Collective Creation vs Individual Recognition Signals: Co-working Arrangements; Teamwork in Virtual Environments; Social Filtering; Life Hacks; Visualization Tools Underlying Technologies: Sense Making & Visualization; Ubiquitous Displays; Amplified Collaboration Tools

The Gore model changes the traditional role of the leader. The leader's job is to make sure the culture is healthy: Is it working as a system? Are teams coming together? Are we getting diverse points of view? Are the best ideas rising to the surface? Our leaders have to be comfortable with not being at the center of all the action, with not trying to drive every decision, with not being the most strategic person on the team or the one with the most thoughtful ideas. Their contribution is to help the organization scale and be effective.

I forked yesterday for the first time. I'm pretty thrilled. Not about the few lines of code that I posted. If anyone notices and thinks the feature is a good idea, they'll re-write my bit from the ground up.* What's thrilling is seeing this ecology in operation, for the software development ecology is now where the most rapid learning happens on the planet, outside the brains of infants.
Compare how ideas and know-how used to propagate in the software world. It used to be that you worked in a highly collaborative environment, so it was already a site of rapid learning. But the barriers to sharing your work beyond your cube-space were high. You could post to a mailing list or UseNet if you had permission to share your company's work, you could publish an article, you could give a talk at a conference. Worse, think about how you would learn if you were not working at a software company or attending college: Getting answers to particular questions - the niggling points that hang you up for days - was incredibly frustrating. I remember spending much of a week trying to figure out how to write to a file in Structured BASIC [SBASIC], my first programming language , eventually cold-calling a computer science professor at Boston University who politely could not help me. I spent a lot of time that summer learning how to spell "Aaaaarrrrrggggghhhhh."
On the other hand, this morning Antonio, who is doing some work for the Library Innovation Lab this summer, poked his head in and pointed us to a jquery-like data visualization library. D3 makes it easy for developers to display data interactively on Web pages (the examples are eye-popping), and the author, mbostock, made it available for free to everyone. So, global software productivity just notched up. A bunch of programs just got easier to use, or more capable, or both. But more than that, if you want to know how to do how mbostock did it, you can read the code. If you want to modify it, you will learn deeply from

The general principles of this rapid-learning ecology are pretty clear. First, we probably have about the same number of smart people as we did twenty years ago, so what's making us all smarter is that we're on a network together. Second, the network has evolved a culture in which there's nothing wrong with not knowing. So we ask. In public. Third, we learn in public. Fourth, learning need not be private act that occurs between a book and a person, or between a teacher and a student in a classroom. Learning that is done in public also adds to that public. Fifth, show your work. Without the "show source" button on browsers, the ability to create HTML pages would have been left in the hands of HTML Professionals. Sixth, sharing is learning is sharing. Holy crap but the increased particularity of our ownership demands about our ideas gets in the way of learning! Knowledge once was developed among small networks of people. Now knowledge is the network.

* Networks provide the underlying structure to a massive part of life and the universe * That network structure applies on many levels, including our brains, the internet (and the collective intelligence it is catalyzing), applications, organizations, and business ecosystems * We can usefully think of these networks as sometimes literally coming to life * The key factors that enable networks at the societal and organizational levels to come to life are Connectivity, Standards, Integration, and Structure * Organizations need to be balanced between structure and chaos to create the conditions for agility, responsiveness, and success * Business ecosystems are central to value creation today, yet require rich flows of information that are predicated on trust and effective strategies for spanning organizational boundaries * Applications are themselves networks, coming to life through modularity, distributed architecture and development, and integration with human processes, thus supporting the living networks of organizations and business ecosystems

Google doesn't have business units! I knew there had to be something different and special about Google to make it the success story that it is. This is what the Googe  CFO had to say in a recent McKinsey interview: Patrick Pichette: We don't have business units. Once a company has business units, managers tend to take ownership of these units' resources. Managers have a plan, and the natural instinct is to say, "Those resources are mine and I have to fight to keep them." This is exactly the issue we regularly see in our organisational network analysis studies. We even wrote about it here in "The Tyranny of Top Down"

Furthermore, we've found that contrary to what many CEOs assume, leadership is not really about delegating tasks and monitoring results; it is about imbuing the entire workforce with a sense of responsibility for the business. This applies mainly to knowledge organizations, but even production-oriented companies can benefit from having employees who feel more empowered and engaged.

If abdication of authority is to yield value for the corporation, however, individuals must be self-motivated. CSC Germany does this by allowing employees to work on the one of five topics that best utilizes their talents and excites their interest. This involves joining a topic community, such as the one focusing on strategy and innovation. Issues are discussed in these groups until all participants come to an agreement, and leadership within the groups shifts frequently, settling on individuals who have the most competence in the areas of focus and are accepted by others as leaders.

We call such practices "mutualism." It involves measuring workers not against revenue or other numerical goals, which we have observed to be ineffective as motivational tools, but against qualitative values such as trust, responsibility, and innovation. And it implies that leaders don't dictate vision or strategy; instead, they enable employees to create a common vision through, for example, off-sites for discussion of strategic issues and regular feedback and education. Hitting numerical goals has been the natural outcome.

Relaxation of control can benefit any knowledge company, but particularly in certain circumstances: when the organization begins to miss opportunities because it can't understand or respond to market demands; when work is impaired because employees feel excessively pressured and harbor dissatisfaction; and when crises imperil the business. Then mutualism is the best way to unleash the power of employees' creativity.

We call such practices "mutualism." It involves measuring workers not against revenue or other numerical goals, which we have observed to be ineffective as motivational tools, but against qualitative values such as trust, responsibility, and innovation. And it implies that leaders don't dictate vision or strategy; instead, they enable employees to create a common vision through, for example, off-sites for discussion of strategic issues and regular feedback and education. Hitting numerical goals has been the natural outcome.

Great worksheet on planning online community from Digital Habitats.

Beth Kanter's blog. Some great stuff on community building in here.

This is an aggregator Nancy curates. (I have a similar set-up on Working Smarter, www.workingsmarterdaily.com) You can search for particular topics from among the sources Nancy tracks.

Awesome chapter from Digital Habiats

Online community practices and policies

The sooner workers are productive, the larger their contribution to the organization. This makes time-to-performance, the amount of time required to begin performing at target levels, a vital metric. Here's an example.

At the end of the last century, Sun Microsystems was a high-flier in the workstation business. Sun was bringing 120 new salespeople a month to a one-week immersion course in Santa Clara. The new hires went through briefings on equipment, applications, competition, Sun, and more. Undoubtedly, most of this gusher of information pouring in one ear and out the other. Fifteen months later, the graduates were selling at quota: $5 million/year.

Social business design