Group items tagged

article by Martin Dewhurst and Paul Willmott, September 2014 on new leadership skills required in age of new information technologies Machines force executives and senior leaders to: 1. open up their companies through crowdsourcing and social platforms within and across organizational boundaries 2. create data sets worthy of the most intelligent machines 3. "let go" in ways that run counter to a century of OD 4. executives...able to make the biggest difference through the human touch. ...questions they frame, their vigor in attaching exceptional circumstances highlighted by increasingly intelligent algorithms ... tolerating ambiguity and focusing on the "softer" side of management to engage the organization and build its capacity for self-renewal. 5. turbocharged data-analytics strategy, a new top-team mind-set, fresh talent approaches, and a concerted effort to break down information silos...transcend number crunching..."weak signals" from social media and other sources also contain powerful insights and should be part of the data-creation process. 6. ...early movers will probably gain insights of unstructured data, such as email discussions between representatives or discussion threads in social media. 7. ...dashboards don't create themselves. Senior executives must find and set the software parameters needed to determine, for instance, which data gets prioritized and which gets flagged for escalation. 8. ...odds of sinking under the weight of even quite valuable insights grow as well. Answer: democratizing it: encouraging and expecting the organization to manage itself without bringing decisions upward. ...business units and functions will be able to make more and better decisions on their own. 9. 8 will happen even as the CEO begins to morph into a "chief experimentation officer," who draws from acute observance of early signals to bolster a company's ability to experiment at scale. 10. need to "let go" will be more significant and the discomfort of s

Blog post by Ann Michaelsen, January 27, 2012 "Have you ever sat down in front of your computer, expecting a lot of work to be done in a certain amount of time, only to find that you have done nothing work-related at all? Or that you've done a lot - just not what you planned to do? Many people are thinking about the way we spend our time and what gets our attention in this digital age. Howard Rheingold calls it infotention and I've been learning a lot about it recently thanks to his challenging but rewarding online course, "Introduction to Mind Amplifiers." It's a five-week experience using asynchronous forums, blogs, wikis, mindmaps, social bookmarks, synchronous audio, video, chat, and Twitter. Participation requires a serious commitment of time and attention by every member of the learning group. Believe me, the skill of staying focused on what is important certainly proves to be helpful here! The world demands "infotention" Infotention is a word I came up with to describe the psycho-social-techno skill/tools we all need to find our way online today, a mind-machine combination of brain-powered attention skills with computer-powered information filters. ~ Howard Rheingold"

Wonderful explanation of the power of pull and its exploration in books written by John Hagel III, John Seely Brown (Social Life of Information author among many other foundational books), and Lang Davison (former director of Deloitte Center for the Edge and editor-in-chief of the McKinsey Quarterly). Endorses community of practice and "socially embedded practice in driving knowledge creation and performance improvement." From April 9, 2010

Article on Leaning into Discomfort: Social Sector Leadership inthe 21st Century, NPQ (Nonprofit Quarterly), May 7, 2012 Excerpt from interview with Nancy Northup, Center for Reproductive Rights: ""In fact, leaning into discomfort, I think, is critical, to make sure that what we are doing-both externally, as we work to establish reproductive rights around the world, and internally, at the organization level-is bold enough. The organization had better be feeling discomfort if it's leaning into new strategies and ways of working. "You have always to ask, Am I pushing for the change that's really needed? On all of those levels, you have to continually refresh and check and make sure that you're getting the most power for the mission by being as uncomfortable as possible. Because change is hard, and the reason why you have to look at all those different levels-yourself, your organization, and then the world-is that if you're not willing to hold the tension of change as an organization, how can you begin to understand what you have to risk and what others have to risk to make change happen in the world?"" Excerpt from interview with Ai-jen Poo, National Domestic Workers Alliance: As Poo observed, "Domestic workers work in isolated workplaces. They don't have any job security whatsoever, and there are no labor standards or protections, except-for now-in New York, because of us. But really, there's nothing mediating the relationship between a worker and an employer-your workplace is somebody else's so-called castle. It already takes a lot of courage to assert your rights and dignity, and to make sure that you get paid on time, and to make sure that you can get home on time to your own children. And all of these challenges that are just day-to-day challenges of living in that environment already demonstrate a tremendous amount of day-to-day courage." Excerpt from interview with George Goehl, National People's Action �

An article for BBC by Maggie Jackson, September 2009, about our inability to pay attention in an age driven by speed through technology "Still, I'm worried. These digital age wonders will be squandered if we can't think critically, research well, and evaluate the data-floods we now have at our fingertips - and these are precisely the skills alarmingly lacking among both digital natives and older generations. Half of college students can't judge the objectivity of a website. Workers now switch tasks every three minutes, half the time interrupting themselves. As David Nicholas points out, we spend our time online 'power-bouncing' from info-snippet to data-point. And this propensity to rely on point-and-click, first-up-on-Google answers, along with our growing unwillingness to wrestle uncomfortably with nuances or uncertainties, keeps us stuck on the surface of the 'information' age. We're too often sacrificing depth for breadth in the ways we make sense of the world. Yes, we've always had 'power bouncing' and distraction. And surfing or multitasking may have an important place in 21st-century society as strategies of learning. But going forward, we need to do much more than hopscotch across the web, split-focused and pulled this way and that by choice distractions. We cannot mistake fragmented, diffused attention as avenues of higher thought. Instead, we need to do better at cultivating - perhaps resuscitating? - deep focus, keen awareness and meta-cognitive 'executive' attention - the skills crucial to creativity and problem-solving. "

interview by Dan Pink with Charles Duhig, breaking down habits into cue, routine, and reward--and and replacing them with better alternatives.

Twitter tips from Powerful Learning Practice.

A nicely organized record of Sheryl's interviews over several years, published in May 2012

Great article on really working smart from Harvard Business Review. Meredith Fineman states complaining being too busy seems to be the new power status: I'm busier than you so I'm more important. She goes on to give examples from her life and experiences of what working smarter, not harder, really means in this world of overwhelm

Great article on really working smart from Harvard Business Review. Meredith Fineman states complaining being too busy seems to be the new power status: I'm busier than you so I'm more important. She goes on to give examples from her life and experiences of what working smarter, not harder, really means in this world of overwhelm

Great article by Adam Lent, Ashoka, on how social media networks unleash the power of people to act as meaningful change makers themselves. June 8, 2015 Suggests that company leaders need to provide the platform to "allow others to flourish and create. Cites Frederic Laloux's book on organizational theory.

blog by Mark Athitakis, Associationsnow blog, August 17, 2015 "Everything I Needed to Know About Association Governance I Learned in Kindergarten: Contribute ideas, respect differences, don't interrupt, ask questions, plan ahead, show up on time, let everybody speak."

Amazing ebook by Daniel Bassill on building networks for good using the Tutor/Mentor Connection in Chicago as model.

John Hagel is a co-chair of Deloitte Center for the Edge. Here he talks about influence points and positioning oneself among influence points through our technology enabled connections. Power laws still concentrate an extraordinary # of connections around a few nodes. But having access to knowledge flows, one will be able to anticipate what's going to happen before others do, one could perhaps shape the flows and more rapid learning may occur because of access to a growing and diverse set of information or knowledge flows. Learning faster than anyone else will enable a company or person to "have a significant advantage relative to those who are scrambling to catch up." Uses the PC microprocessor and operating system components to concretize influence points.

great article on using our power to change circumstances in the workplace

excellent discussion of networks and social learning in organizations with references to Hart, Jennings, Cross, and Internet Time Alliance among others, 2010

Great elegant graphic of reflective learning, and a 4 step process. He has developed the 70:20:10 method of blended learning. This is from his blog on blogspot.

Women having been knocking at the gates of men's power for decades. But while the gates may be open, the number of women reaching top positions of power is disappointingly low.

Blog post by Jeff Cobb, February 2011, Tagoras site, on adults' self-concept of being responsible for their own decisions and how this is as odds with their frequent relapse into their K-12 expectations/habits/behaviors in adult learning situations. Explanation of Malcolm Knowles's concepts of the Adult Learner: 1. Adults need to know why they need to learn. 2. Adults have a self-concept of being responsible for their own decisions - they have a psychological need to be seen by others as capable of self-direction. 3. Experience is often the best foundation for adult learning activities - often the "richest resources for learning reside in the adult learners themselves." [66] 4. Adults tend to be most interested in learning that has immediate relevance to their jobs or personal lives. 5. Adult learners tend to be life-centered (or task-centered, or problem-centered) rather than subject or content-centered. 6. Adults are typically more responsive to internal motivators (job satisfaction, self esteem, quality of life, etc.) than external motivators (promotions, higher salaries, etc.). Excerpt on how online learning environments are not always recognized as such and how facilitation of learning networks is critical: "Finally - something I have been arguing in one way or another for years - the problematic side of "self-concept" pretty much flies out the window if you remove the obvious, traditional labels like "seminar" or "Webinar." This is a key reason why social networks are so powerful as learning environments - people tend not to consciously acknowledge them as such even though learning is typically the key social object in any professional community that survives and thrives over time. Educators must recognize this and learn to facilitate learning within networks if they want to truly lead learning in their fields and industries."

Very powerful blog post in the Leadership Learning Community by Deborah Mehan, June 28, 2013, on collective leadership through networks, and how customized supports such as coaching can help these groups learn and take successful action.

article by Joshua Rothman on leadership and how our views of leadership have changed through the centuries and how leadership virtues don't always agree with the actions taken by "leaders" whom we admire.