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There were many successes, but far too many more failures in this endeavor. Why? Companies absorbed the process of Design Thinking all to well, turning it into a linear, gated, by-the-book methodology that delivered, at best, incremental change and innovation. Call it N+1 innovation. Above all, CQ is about abilities. I can call them literacies or fluencies. If you walk into one of Katie Salen's Quest to Learn classes or a business strategy class at the Rotman School of Management, you can see people being taught behaviors that raise their CQ. You can see it in the military, corporations, and sports teams. It is about more than thinking, it is about learning by doing and learning how to do the new in an uncertain, ambiguous, complex space--our lives today.

Location based social network Foursquare celebrated 10 million registered users yesterday but how are businesses and organizations using the platform? I wrote a year ago next month about the incredible potential offered by Foursquare accounts for organizations: following a Foursquare page as a user is like opting-in to view the world through the lens of that organization's geo-annotations. It can be awesome. (My favorites? History Channel and Eater.) Are businesses getting into it? For one perspective on that question, I extracted some data from the 128 most recent Foursquare Pages that have been created. The 128 most recent Foursquare Page holders have added 728 tips in 311 cities so far. They've amassed a total of over 8,000 Foursquare followers and they came in with some social media experience as well: those organizations already had an aggregate of over 800,000 Twitter followers.

After Local Motors won the XC2V competition, they were given a mere 14 weeks to build a prototype of their "FLYPMODE" concept, a vehicle built on a common chassis capable of performing both combat resupply and medical evacuation missions. As it turns out, they didn't even need all 14 weeks, and were able to complete the prototype ahead of schedule, no problem. Check out a bunch of pics of the not yet armed but otherwise fully operational XC2V vehicle in the gallery below. Part of the point of this whole exercise was to see how effectively crowd-sourcing through private industry could be used to design, develop, and build a new vehicle. In a result that will shock nobody at all, the XC2V went from concept to prototype some five times faster than it normally takes our ponderously bloated war machine to come up with something similar. While DARPA hasn't commented on cost, I imagine that it was exponentially cheaper, too.

Social media, or at least its widespread use, may be relatively new, but certain human behaviors are not. For example, David Aaker, blogging at the Harvard Business Review, points to a study by Ernest Dichter from 1966 on word-of-mouth persuasion. The report had three key findings, all of which are relevant to social business today.

The FBI has long been known for its straightforward "Just the facts, ma'am" approach, an image reinforced by Director Robert S. Mueller III's stoic presence and reluctance to court the media. But in a sign that the online revolution is infiltrating that most traditional of agencies, the bureau unveiled Monday a publicity campaign featuring public service announcements in 14 cities and billboards in New York's Times Square, along with a heavy dose of Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.

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.

Marion Crain, JD, suggests looking at other legal models such as marriage law to more accurately respond to the realities of the employment relationship, particularly at termination. "The employment relationship possesses many attributes that we associate with marriage: emotional and economic investment, interdependence, and expectations that the relationship will endure absent bad behavior," she says.

"One of the keys to happiness at work is earning a lot of money, but what is equally important, if not more important, is that our earnings not be inferior to those of our peers, that is, of the colleagues we compare ourselves to. This is revealed by a study carried out at Universidad Carlos III in Madrid that analyzes the relationship between happiness and income from work."

"Managers tend to pick higher-risk options when forced to choose between competing alternatives to complex situations, according to researchers from the University of Guelph and University of Waterloo whose study was published recently in the Journal of Business Ethics. But when they're not forced to choose, managers tend to reflect more and solve problems with fewer negative consequences, says the study."

"The Pottstown (Pa.) Mercury is using a Pinterest board of wanted-criminal mugshots to engage readers and help police make arrests"

"Effective teamwork among an organization's top management makes employees happier and more productive, with positive benefits to the organization."

"With the rise of texting, instant chat and transcription apps, more people are ditching the venerable tool that once revolutionized the telephone business, displaced armies of secretaries and allowed us to eat dinner more or less in peace. The behavioral shift is occurring in tandem with the irreversible fading of voice calls in general, prompting more wireless carriers to offer unlimited voice minutes. In data prepared for USA Today, Vonage, an Internet phone company, says the number of voice-mail messages left on user accounts was down 8 percent in July from a year ago."

Walmart has purchased Small Society, a Portland-based mobile developer that's built apps for Starbucks, Amazon, Whole Foods, ZipCar, the Democratic National Committee, and others. Financial terms were not disclosed in an announcement on the retail giant's @WalmartLabs blog earlier today. Small Society's team will join an existing @WalmartLabs location in Oregon, according to the post. Launched in 2011, @WalmartLabs is designed to create technologies that propel the multi-channel brand as a social-mobile commerce player in the years to come. The company also appears to be mounting an agency-like infrastructure that could bypass vendors, keeping some digital marketing development in-house at the Bentonville, AR-based big box merchandiser.

Aguinis noted that the power-law approach has applications in groups of all types and sizes, including governments, nonprofits, education systems and corporations. However, changing theory and practice will be challenging, due partly to deeply entrenched notions of fairness and equality in society and business. Further, it could pose difficult ethical dilemmas, because it requires taking care of the "superstars" first in the context of treating everyone fairly.