Group items tagged

Drucker’s solutions for fragmented executives—reserve large blocks of time on your calendar, don’t answer the phone, and return calls in short bursts once or twice a day—sound remarkably like the ones offered up by today’s time- and information-management experts.2

Add to these challenges a torrent of e-mail, huge volumes of other information, and an expanding variety of means—from the ever-present telephone to blogs, tweets, and social networks—through which executives can connect with their organizations and customers, and you have a recipe for exhaustion. Many senior executives literally have two overlapping workdays: the one that is formally programmed in their diaries and the one “before, after, and in-between,” when they disjointedly attempt to grab spare moments with their laptops or smart phones, multitasking in a vain effort to keep pace with the information flowing toward them.

First, multitasking is a terrible coping mechanism.

mix of iPads and tablets with detachable keyboards.

HP EliteBook Revolve 810 G3, a laptop-tablet hybrid

Some K-12 systems are moving away from iPads and on to Chromebooks. And many elementary schools use Kindles and tablets made by Samsung and Android rather than Apple iPads.

“We talk to community managers all the time and we ask ‘What’s the thing you didn’t think was going to be part of your role? What’s the one component you were surprised how much time you were spending on it?’ It’s almost always evangelism and coaching,” said Jim Storer, principal and cofounder of The Community Roundtable, during a webinar earlier this month cohosted with community platform provider Higher Logic. Storer’s colleague and TheCR cofounder Rachel Happe added that the organization created a working group on the role of “becoming an internal consultant,” just to help TheCR members excel in that role.

TheCR report also notes that “best-in-class” online communities are more often managed by a staff team, rather than by a single person.

“Given what we now know about the complexity of—and potential for—sustained and productive engagement, the notion that a lone community manager can address all the strategic, operational, and tactical responsibilities is quickly fading,” the report states. “Implementing many of the processes and programs that are markers of maturity generally requires more resources, and best-in-class communities with bigger teams are able to prioritize community programming, advocacy programs, community management training, and other key community elements.”

Open-source software often gets derided for its downsides—maintenance concerns, the need for development resources, concerns about security—but its huge transparency and collaboration benefits typically get missed.

(It’s worth noting that you may be using open-source software without realizing it: Most major content management systems, including WordPress and Drupal, are based on open-source code bases. Not that you’d immediately think of them in that context.)

Open source tends to follow current standards. The reason Mozilla Firefox gained so much momentum on Microsoft’s Internet Explorer about a decade ago has everything to do with programming strategy. IE, being proprietary and without much competition, didn’t have a reason to keep innovating quickly. Firefox, on the other hand, was in a spot to iterate relatively quickly and drive online development—and when Google Chrome came into the picture, this process moved even faster. This is true of a lot of open-source software. It can ensure you’re working with this year’s model.

This isn’t the first time this has happened, that big data sets full of personal information – supposedly obscured, or de-identified, as the process is called – have been reverse engineered to reveal some or even all of the identities contained within. It makes you wonder: Is there really such a thing as a truly anonymous data set in the age of big data?

That might sound like a bore, but think about it this way: there’s more than taxi cab data at stake here. Pretty much everything you do on the Internet these days is a potential data set. And data has value. The posts you like on Facebook, your spending habits as tracked by Mint, the searches you make on Google – the argument goes that the social, economic and academic potential of sharing these immensely detailed so-called “high dimensional” data sets with third parties is too great to ignore.

University of Colorado Law School associate professor Paul Ohm’s 2009 paper on the topic made the bold claim that “data can be either useful or perfectly anonymous but never both.”

For those that host online communities for their members, the new front-line staff may very well be the person managing the online community.

Wohlers is the lead staff manager for SPE Connect, a platform for SPE’s 141,000 members to meet and discuss their industry, and its multiple communities for various technical areas, subdisciplines, and association committees.

It’s almost always evangelism and coaching,” s

Bethel and Grandview both pursued open resources in large part because they were not satisfied that commercial curricula were closely aligned with the common core.

They called on their teachers, and other content experts, to help them find the open resources that hit the mark.

It's safe to assume many districts switching to open resources will have to devote large amounts of time and money to finding what they need and preparing teachers to use new materials, Mr. Bliss said. Yet that work brings rewards, he argued. In going through that process, teachers get "some of the best PD they've ever had."

INCIVILITY also hijacks workplace focus

According to a survey of more than 4,500 doctors, nurses and other hospital personnel, 71 percent tied disruptive behavior, such as abusive, condescending or insulting personal conduct, to medical errors, and 27 percent tied such behavior to patient deaths.

incivility miss information that is right in front of them. They are no longer able to process it as well or as efficiently as they would otherwise.

teachers are far more likely to use technology to make their own jobs easier and to supplement traditional instructional strategies than to put students in control of their own learning. Case study after case study describe a common pattern inside schools: A handful of "early adopters" embrace innovative uses of new technology, while their colleagues make incremental or no changes to what they already do.

numerous culprits

Washington-based International Society for Technology in Education

Selling/finding new customers is a long process – that is no different in social media than anywhere else.

Social Media is about interaction and connecting. Not about sales pitches. Find your target audience and provide what they want first.

Everybody needs a message. What is the value you provide? What do you want to be known for? Why should people want to work with you?

But whether or not they succeed will depend on the alignment of a very special trinity: leadership, culture and strategy. Collaborative organisations have leadership models that are open, conversational in style and flat. That’s certainly the style at Tangerine where everyone is a “leader” and everyone can expect to talk to anyone and be listened too.

These organisations also have cultures that are open, high on trust and low on fear of failure. The message isn’t: “What went wrong?” but “What did you learn?”. They have strategies that clearly articulate the benefits of new styles of working. And they create the structures that support, recognise and reward it.

Overall, there are eight ways to spot a collaborative organisation:   Leadership teams model collaborative behaviours Resources are devoted to developing and sustaining this way of working High levels of task interdependence The default setting is sharing information There are high levels of trust Conflict seen as part of the creative process – everyone understands and can deal with it The environment of the company and its technology support collaborative working People don’t have to talk about it – it’s just the way things get done

Silos allow staff to specialize in their unique talents, give them accountability, and provide clarity about tasks that need to be accomplished. “When we start talk about silos, it goes immediately to the negative,” Clancy says. “It's important for leaders to talk about what silos add. They do have a place in organizations to allow for focus on what you're responsible for, moving things forward and getting jobs done. To a certain degree, they are a necessary requirement to getting work done.” Of course, the problems begin when the intensity of organizational silos shifts to the extreme, and inefficiencies and animosity bubble to the surface. Fortunately, there are many ways to break down silos. It's an ongoing process, and nonprofits are continually striving to improve the way people interact with one another.

Dr. Rohini Anand, Chief Diversity Officer, Sodexo Ron Glover, Chief Diversity Officer, IBM Kathy Hannan, National Managing Partner, Diversity & Corporate Responsibility, KPMG LLP

Make it Real or Lose Your Authenticity

Executives are Still Short-Sided

Managing a diverse workplace begins with strong policies of equality from the company.

qualifications of the candidate based on the quality of his experience

creating teams and special work groups within the company.

This is the time of year when many of us fall off our resolution-wagons. "Forget it," we say when the results aren't what we thought they'd be. "I don't know why I ever thought I could change in the first place." We set unreasonable goals, beat ourselves up when we fall short of them, and then use those shortcomings as proof that real change simply isn't possible. And by believing that, we make it so.

change is slow and subtle. It isn't about grand gestures or sweeping declarations. It's about the small things you do on a daily basis that eventually add up to something more -- and the beautiful thing about "a daily basis" is that a new one starts every day. You get to decide to start the process of change right now, even if the scale is smaller than what you had in mind. Smaller scales are better anyway; sudden, sweeping change never ends up being real. It's the painstaking, repetitive, meandering change that ends up sticking -- the kind that takes place in the grit and muscle of life's grind. That's the substance of long-term change.

Teachers should focus on students' efforts and not on their abilities. When students succeed, teachers should praise their efforts or their strategies, not their intelligence. (

When students fail, teachers should also give feedback about effort or strategies -- what the student did wrong and what he or she could do now.

teachers should help students value effort.

His new book The Power of Habit explores the science behind why we do what we do — and how companies are now working to use our habit formations to sell and market products to us.

every habit starts with a psychological pattern called a "habit loop," which is a three-part process. First, there's a cue, or trigger,

third step, he says, is the reward: something that your brain likes that helps it remember the "habit loop" in the future.