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A workplace's key employees may be at the greatest risk of experiencing high levels of work stress, according to a new study by the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH).

Admittedly, it can be difficult to quantify a specific profit or revenue impact from some types of experience enhancers-more robust "voice of the customer" programs, more polished customer statements, better trained front-line personnel, streamlined customer touchpoints, a more user-friendly website, etc. The financials surrounding such initiatives are much less precise than those of hard-dollar initiatives, like the renegotiation of real estate leases or the consolidation of corporate functions. Of course, that doesn't mean customer experience investments have any less of a compelling return than these other endeavors. It just takes a little more work to quantify it. And, frankly, in some cases, it requires a leap of faith.

It seems that the Enterprise 2.0 and eLearning community has recently discovered the idea of Value Networks. This concept has been around in the work of Verna Alee, Clayton Christensen, and many others for at least ten years. Christian Briggs, co-founder of SociaLens wrote a chapter about it in 2009, entitled "Web 2.0 Business Models as Decentralized Value Creation Systems" in the following book: http://www.springer.com/computer/swe/book/978-0-387-85894-4

Organizations that are willing to overturn their communication norms can, with today's digital tools, access these benefits. Those that don't embrace Enterprise 2.0, meanwhile, will stay closer to their historical levels of knowing what they know. Which type would you prefer to work for? To invest in?

Though this study is informative and interesting, there are some serious limitations that should be taken into account if we are to generalize its results to all situations of collective action (like organizations). We may do a longer writeup some time in the future, but here are a few questions that it raises: Oh, and here is a link to the original paper: http://ow.ly/3VaS4 -----Is this a problem of the technology, or of fluency with the technology?---- "This is the danger with lean media, and is especially frustrating because it implies that if a willingness to cooperate can be effectively conveyed to other group members-perhaps an easier problem to fix than curing opportunistic intent-the problems of non-cooperation..they just did not know if they could rely on others to reciprocate." (p. 119) These conclusions suggest that fluency with a medium and the norms of communication through that medium may play a significant role in trust. In other words, if i am not good at communicating my intent to cooperate within the limitations of any medium (including face-to-face speech), i will have a hard time building trust. ----Are all digital media still as "lean" as email was in 2005?--- This study bases its concept of "media richness" on 1986 work by Daft and Lengel which suggested a continuum of media richness that contains face-to-face on the "rich" end and things like reports on the "lean" end. The assumption that social media, MMORPG's, digital collaboration platforms, etc are also at the lower end with email is very, very questionable.  ----Can we generalize the behavior of business students to all situations of collective action?---- The participants were all upper-level business students from the early 2000's, who are socialized and train to deal with colle

----Norms of anonymity may have changed since 2005---- There seems to have been an increase in people using digital technologies (especially social media) as a way to build their identity, rather than anonymize it. In fact, services have sprung up to provide people with personal landing pages (http://lifehacker.com/#!5534456/five-best-personal-landing-pages). If this is true, then there is likely a corresponding pressure to build and maintain trust in a world of digital trails and easy search.

The Army has a well-established history of using television commercials to reach possible recruits. The Times quotes the simply impossibly named Lt. Gen. Benjamin C. Freakley on the motivation for the new direction in recruiting. "We're working hard to increase our social media. We fully recognize that young people TiVo over commercials or are multitasking on their smartphones when the commercials come on...We have to reach out in forms like we're discussing to get them to want to know more, to join us in social media and extend the dialog." The branding message remains consistent, if not terribly clear to me: "Army Strong." It plays out across a number of properties, including a website, Army Strong Stories, and a Go Army Facebook page (complete with exclusive X-Men movie footage).

Feedback loops are how we learn, whether we call it trial and error or course correction. In so many areas of life, we succeed when we have some sense of where we stand and some evaluation of our progress. Indeed, we tend to crave this sort of information; it's something we viscerally want to know, good or bad. As Stanford's Bandura put it, "People are proactive, aspiring organisms." Feedback taps into those aspirations. But maybe requiring people to do a little work-to stick accelerometers around their house or plug a device into a wall socket-is just enough of a nudge to get our brains engaged in the prospect for change.

Alex Pang, a visiting fellow at Microsoft Research Cambridge, actively researches this area. Pang proposes a new paradigm called contemplative computing. Today he gave a talk on the idea at the Lift France 2011 conference and has published a PDF of it. You can also find a rough draft of his paper on contemplative computing. So can computers actually help improve our concentration and contemplation, instead of leading us into distraction? The problem, as Pang puts it, is that "Technologies that were supposed to help us think better, work more efficiently, and connect more meaningfully with others now interrupt us, divide our attention, and stretch us thin."

Companies that build systems that people use have power. But they have to be very very very careful about how they assert that power. It's really easy to come in and try to configure the user through force. It's a lot harder to work diligently to design and build the ecosystem in which healthy norms emerge. Yet, the latter is of critical importance to the creation of a healthy community. Cuz you can't get to a healthy community through force.

Scientists and engineers who produce innovative work aren't in it just for the money, according to researchers from Duke University and the Georgia Institute of Technology.

Bloomberg's new social media policy encourages reporters to use Twitter - but with stipulations. It might seem like an obvious move for a news organization these days, but some traditional outlets, including Bloomberg, have managed to hold off until now. Dan Fletcher, the new social media director for Bloomberg, told employees about the new policy in an internal memo, which we received from an anonymous source close to the matter. "While the policy is meant to extend broadly across all social networks, we're encouraging reporters and editors to get started with Twitter," he said. "Twitter is easy to use and has become a valuable news source for millions of users. It's the best way to help readers discover the work you're doing and monitoring conversations within your beat."

Good strategy, in contrast, works by focusing energy and resources on one, or a very few, pivotal objectives whose accomplishment will lead to a cascade of favorable outcomes. It also builds a bridge between the critical challenge at the heart of the strategy and action-between desire and immediate objectives that lie within grasp. Thus, the objectives that a good strategy sets stand a good chance of being accomplished, given existing resources and competencies.

Most marketing departments work hard to establish a flawless reputation for their product or service. But new research from Tel Aviv University is showing that perfection is not all it's cracked up to be.

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.

"The old saying "fake it until you make it" might actually be sound professional advice, with new University of Melbourne research finding self-confidence is a key determinant of workplace success"

The researchers argue that as design and communication costs decline, single user and open collaborative innovation models will be viable for a steadily wider range of design. These two models will present an increasing challenge to the traditional paradigm of producer-based design-but, when open, they are good for social welfare and should be encouraged by policymakers.

At EMC, instead of starting long e-mail threads, employees can check updates about a project on a Jive page, search for relevant materials, and download the files as they need them. Sales representatives looking for insight about a competitor can query the "competitive community" on EMC's internal social network and get an answer as they walk to a client meeting, Pappas says. The company also now uses Jive's tools externally, to augment user-support forums and to create community or "affinity" pages for clients that use EMC software.