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American companies and organizations spend billions of dollars every year on leadership training for their managers. To improve job performance they ought instead to focus on what managers believe about their employees, a study by the University of California, Riverside shows.

HR and IT are not working together in ways the workforce needs, and L&D professionals are hard pressed to demonstrate the impact of their efforts on individual performance and bottom-line results. The professionals of the incoming generation, Gen Y, are demanding a complete overhaul of how you connect with them, coach them and teach them, but only about one-quarter of new managers get the effective coaching or training they need when assuming their new role. What do your learners find outside of your company? They find that IT and training play together quite well. For example, Apple's store has over 300,000 apps, thousands of which deliver on-the-fly tutorials plus developmental and assessment tools tailored to every need, many of which are free.

Kiln Group, an insurance specialist underwriting firm at Lloyds of London, wants to protect companies from the damage that Stupid Tweet Syndrome (our name for the disease) can cause. Details are not clear as to what exactly the insurance would pay out but if a brand is substantially damage by a vindictive or careless tweet, Kiln Group would be able to cover it.

And while many of them are hiring, they are increasingly picky. They are all looking for the same kind of people - people who not only have the critical thinking skills to do the value-adding jobs that technology can't, but also people who can invent, adapt and reinvent their jobs every day, in a market that changes faster than ever. Today's college grads need to be aware that the rising trend in Silicon Valley is to evaluate employees every quarter, not annually. Because the merger of globalization and the I.T. revolution means new products are being phased in and out so fast that companies cannot afford to wait until the end of the year to figure out whether a team leader is doing a good job.

By Jeremiah Owyang with Andrew Jones, Christine Tran, and Andrew Nguyen Includes input from 63 ecosystem contributors, survey data from 144 social business program managers, and analysis of 50 social media crises

"We like to think that more information drives smarter decisions; that the more details we absorb, the better off we'll be. It's why we subscribe to Google Alerts, cling to our iPhone, and fire up our Tweetdeck. Knowledge, we're told, is power. But what if our thirst for data is actually holding us back? What if obsessing over information actually reduces the quality of our decisions? That's the question raised by Princeton and Stanford University psychologists in a fascinating study titled On the Pursuit and Misuse of Useless Information."

Wired interview with Sherry Turkle about her new book "Alone Together." What she is talking about here (though she does not say it explicitly) is the need for fluency - to know when and why to use digital technology as opposed to just how and what.