Modest background noise, the scientists explain, creates enough of a distraction to encourage people to think more imaginatively.

Giving undivided attention is the first and most basic ingredient in any relationship. It is impossible to communicate, much less bond, with someone who can't or won't focus on you. At the same time, we often fail to realize how what we focus on comes to control our thoughts, our actions, and indeed, our very lives.

Zudem wird es in zehn Jahren nicht mehr nur eine IT-Abteilung, sondern zwei geben: eine für die Technik und eine für die Prozesse.

Net Smart offers up a set of five literacies Rheingold sees as important: attention, participation, collaboration, “crap detection,” and network smarts.

We often divide our attention online, but at any given moment make “micro decisions” about what we’re going to do — write emails for work, watch a YouTube video, get lost in Twitter. Rheingold says we have to connect our attention to our intention and be more aware of how what we’re actively doing relates (or often doesn’t) to what we need.

Here are eight rules for creating the right conditions for a culture that reflects your creed:

The command-and-control approach to management has in recent years become less and less viable. Globalization, new technologies, and changes in how companies create value and interact with customers have sharply reduced the efficacy of a purely directive, top-down model of leadership. What will take the place of that model? Part of the answer lies in how leaders manage communication within their organizations—that is, how they handle the flow of information to, from, and among their employees. Traditional corporate communication must give way to a process that is more dynamic and more sophisticated. Most important, that process must be conversational.

good content curation isn’t as simple as pushing a share button. It’s actually a combination of finding great content and following some simple best practices on how to successfully share that content.

1. Be Part of the Content Ecosystem

2. Follow a Schedule

Todd’s main goal is to get people to creatively and intelligently think together.  What’s interesting about this is that Todd is not specifically focusing on integrating this into specific projects or even into the general work of employees.

Collaboration. It’s a $1 billion industry, according to an ABI Research study on worker mobility and enterprise social collaboration. And it's projected to grow to $3.5 billion by 2016. No wonder lots of ink has been spilled on this business buzzword on everything from how to start (hint: build trust) to doing it better with social platforms, to using it as a way to achieve that holy grail of business: innovation.

there’s a big difference between working alongside other staff members and actually collaborating.

how to inject more diversity and expertise into your strategy process, to get leaders closer to the operational implications of their decisions, or to avoid the experience-based biases and orthodoxies that inevitably creep into small groups at the top

from “all-knowing decision makers,” who are expected to know everything and tell others what to do, to “social architects,” who spend a lot of time thinking about how to create the processes and incentives that unearth the best thinking and unleash the full potential of all who work at a company.7

From the business side, flexible employee schedules mean global customers can be better served across time zones; bad weather doesn’t close down the whole operation; and real estate, technology, healthcare, and environmental costs can be reduced.

"Das Entscheidende ist, dass man sich nah fühlt, obwohl man getrennt sitzt. Das nennen wir 'virtuelle Nähe'. Wir haben im Alltag mehr Aufgaben, als das, was wir abarbeiten können. Und es ist so: Denjenigen, der mir am nächsten ist, den bediene ich, und deshalb wird aus meiner Sicht in der Virtualität der menschliche Teil noch wichtiger, sonst mach ich das nicht."

Curation is the act of individuals with a passion for a content area to find, contextualize, and organize information. Curators provide a consistent update regarding what's interesting, happening, and cool in their focus. Curators tend to have a unique and consistent point of view--providing a reliable context for the content that they discover and organize.

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg is familiar with the funny, uncertain feeling that comes with checking out soon after 5:00 to be with family, and although she used to worry about what others thought of her departure time (which is a completely reasonable hour to head home, by the way), she has finally reached a point where she can take off at 5:30 p.m. without the lingering concern of how others are perceiving her.

collaboration improves when the roles of individual team members are clearly defined and well understood — in fact, when individuals feel their role is bounded in ways that allow them to do a significant portion of their work independently. Without such clarity, team members are likely to waste energy negotiating roles or protecting turf, rather than focusing on the task.

"Many organizations have now passed the definitional stage of cloud computing and are testing cloud architectures inside and outside the enterprise and over time, the cloud will simply become one of the ways that we 'do' computing, and workloads will move around in hybrid internal/external IT environments,"

Staff morale is closely linked with company productivity and performance, yet HR and Corporate Communications managers often have limited tools to impact morale. This free white paper uses extensive data and research, expert insight, and real-world examples to explain how a social intranet can improve employee engagement.