Many of these quotes from Henry Ford are relevant for organisational learning and leadership. They seem to have withstood the test of time very well. Like the best ideas they are simple and self-evident.
Corporate leadership is already struggling to keep up with the connected workforce and increasing speed and complexity in the digital economy. But looking ahead to the rise of algorithmic and human-machine co-working, the situation is even more worrying. A reboot is overdue.
Many companies have invested significantly in
gathering vast amounts of data, yet they still
struggle to extract insights, put them to work for
the business and create truly data-driven
organisations. The virtuous circle of data explores
how organisations can spark a chain of events
through top-down leadership and bottom-up
employee engagement that creates a culture with
data at the centre of decision-making.
Many companies have invested significantly in
gathering vast amounts of data, yet they still
struggle to extract insights, put them to work for
the business and create truly data-driven
organisations. The virtuous circle of data explores
how organisations can spark a chain of events
through top-down leadership and bottom-up
employee engagement that creates a culture with
data at the centre of decision-making.
In the communities that we choose to belong to (online and offline), we have to do our part in feeding it. It is only when we are generous about sharing our gifts that we build credibility to receive anything meaningful in return, build influence, thought leadership and learn.
"Despite the sobering economic shocks of recent years, the Fun at Work movement seems irrepressible. Major companies boast of employing Chief Fun Officers or Happiness Engineers; corporations call upon a burgeoning industry of happiness consultants, who'll construct a Gross Happiness Index for your workplace, then advise you on ways to boost it."
Preventing valuable knowledge from walking out the doorLike many other companies, TVA is facing the imminent retirement of a large percentage of its work force-an estimated 30 to 40 percent of employees will retire over the next five years. These experienced employees possess much unique, undocumented knowledge. Many of them literally built the plants and facilities that they now operate and maintain.
TVA were the pioneers for knowledge retention. The original presentation to their board was back in 1998. Most other KRT programmes, including M&S and KIN can trace their origins back to this original work by Andy Wright, a senior manager in Leadership Development at TVA.
This paper introduces Dervin's Sense-Making Methodology (SMM) as an approach to KM system design using Web2.0. SMM is a philosophically derived approach which allows knowledge management (KM) researchers and practitioners to more fully understand and listen to user's needs so as to inform the design of dialogic KM practices and systems to promote knowledge sharing.
"Uniting the Virtual Workforce offers much-needed guidance on how to navigate the largely unmapped territory of virtual work environments in the global economy. The authors do an outstanding job of presenting how organizations should address the challenges of virtual workforces so as to reap the huge potential benefits of increased growth, productivity, and innovation."
-C. Warren Axelrod, PhD, Chief Privacy Officer and Business Information Security Officer, U.S. Trust, and author of Outsourcing Information Security