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Some of the world's most innovative thinkers and strategists have shared their views on how business is adapting to global challenges. Download our podcasts each day this week and hear the presentations made at the recent London Business School Global Leadership Summit:

At most companies, going AWOL during daylight hours would be grounds for a pink slip. Not at Best Buy. The nation's leading electronics retailer has embarked on a radical--if risky--experiment to transform a culture once known for killer hours and herd-riding bosses. The endeavor, called ROWE, for "results-only work environment," seeks to demolish decades-old business dogma that equates physical presence with productivity. The goal at Best Buy is to judge performance on output instead of hours. Hence workers pulling into the company's amenity-packed headquarters at 2 p.m. aren't considered late. Nor are those pulling out at 2 p.m. seen as leaving early. There are no schedules. No mandatory meetings. No impression-management hustles. Work is no longer a place where you go, but something you do. It's O.K. to take conference calls while you hunt, collaborate from your lakeside cabin, or log on after dinner so you can spend the afternoon with your kid. Best Buy did not invent the post-geographic office. Tech companies have been going bedouin for several years. At IBM (IBM ), 40% of the workforce has no official office; at AT&T, a third of managers are untethered. Sun Microsystems Inc. (SUNW ) calculates that it's saved $400 million over six years in real estate costs by allowing nearly half of all employees to work anywhere they want. And this trend seems to have legs. A recent Boston Consulting Group study found that 85% of executives expect a big rise in the number of unleashed workers over the next five years. In fact, at many companies the most innovative new product may be the structure of the workplace itself.

They've got the smarts and the confidence to get a job, but increasing numbers of the millennial generation — those in their mid-20s and younger — are deciding corporate America just doesn't fit their needs. So armed with a hefty dose of optimism, moxie and self-esteem, they are becoming entrepreneurs. "People are realizing they don't have to go to work in suits and ties and don't have to talk about budgets every day," says Ben Kaufman, 20, founder of a company that makes iPod accessories. "They can have a job they like. They can create a job for themselves."

"They want to create a custom life and create the kind of career that fits around the kind of life they want," says Bruce Tulgan, the founder of RainmakerThinking, a management training firm in New Haven, Conn., and an author specializing in generational diversity in the workplace. Experts say these children of the baby-boom generation, also known as Gen Y or echo boomers, are taking to heart a desire for the kind of work-life balance their parents didn't have. They see being their own boss as a way to resolve the conflict. So now they're pressing ahead with new products or services or finding a new twist on old-style careers. They're at the leading edge of a trend toward entrepreneurship that has bubbled for decades and now, thanks in large part to technology, is starting to surge. "It is a fun-loving generation," says Ellen Kossek, a Michigan State University professor in East Lansing who has spent 18 years researching workplace flexibility. "They view work as part of life, but they don't live to work the way we were socialized as boomers. There is a real mismatch between what the young generation wants and what employers are offering."

Those who have studied generations in the workplace, such as author David Stillman of Minneapolis, do have some insights. Stillman, who co-wrote the 2002 book When Generations Collide, say these young workers have very different ideas than earlier generations. "This generation has the group-think mentality," he says. "When you are raised to collaborate at home, then you are taught how to do that in middle school and practice it in college, you show up at work saying 'Where's my team?' They're just comfortable working with peers." Many go into business with friends.

"Generation Y is much less likely to respond to the traditional command-and-control type of management still popular in much of today's workforce," says Jordan Kaplan, an associate managerial science professor at Long Island University-Brooklyn in New York. "They've grown up questioning their parents, and now they're questioning their employers. They don't know how to shut up, which is great, but that's aggravating to the 50-year-old manager who says, 'Do it and do it now.' " That speak-your-mind philosophy makes sense to Katie Patterson, an assistant account executive at Edelman Public Relations in Atlanta. The 23-year-old, who hails from Iowa and now lives with two roommates in a town home, likes to collaborate with others, and says many of her friends want to run their own businesses so they can be independent. "We are willing and not afraid to challenge the status quo," she says. "An environment where creativity and independent thinking are looked upon as a positive is appealing to people my age. We're very independent and tech savvy."

Companies are finding it harder to hire and retain younger people, and applications at business schools are plunging. 70 MILLION STRONG.  Nick Hahn, a managing director at Vivaldi Partners, a New York consulting firm, remembers just a decade ago when he was looking for a job, how most college graduates would have given almost anything for a top-paying spot at a big-name investment bank or consulting firm. It was taken for granted that to climb the corporate ladder they would all work 80-plus-hour weeks. That's beginning to change. Increasingly, "today, college grads ask: 'what can your firm do for me' to help them lead a more purposeful and meaningful life," says Hahn.

Kaizen philosophy continuous incremental improvements Kaizen method   The Kaizen method of continuous incremental improvements is an originally Japanese management concept for incremental (gradual, continuous) change (improvement). K. is actually a way of life philosophy, assuming that every aspect of our life deserves to be constantly improved. The Kaizen philosophy lies behind many Japanese management concepts such as Total Quality Control, Quality Control circles, small group activities, labor relations. Key elements of Kaizen are quality, effort, involvement of all employees, willingness to change, and communication.   Japanese companies distinguish between innovation (radical) and Kaizen (continuous). K. means literally: change (kai) to become good (zen).   The foundation of the Kaizen method consists of 5 founding elements: 1. teamwork, 2. personal discipline, 3. improved morale, 4. quality circles, and 5. suggestions for improvement.   Out of this foundation three key factors in K. arise: - elimination of waste (muda) and inefficiency - the Kaizen five-S framework for good housekeeping       1. Seiri - tidiness       2. Seiton - orderliness       3. Seiso - cleanliness       4. Seiketsu - standardized clean-up       5. Shitsuke - discipline - standardization.   When to apply the Kaizen philosophy? Although it is difficult to give generic advice it is clear that it fits well in incremental change situations that require long-term change and in collective cultures. More individual cultures that are more focused on short-term success are often more conducive to concepts such as Business Process Reengineering.   When Kaizen is compared to BPR is it clear the K. philosophy is more people-oriented, more easy to implement, requires long-term discipline. BPR on the other hand is harder, technology-oriented, enables radical change but requires major change management skills.

Welcome to KnowledgeBoard We are a self-moderating global community thinking and collaborating on subjects around (but not limited to) Knowledge Management and Innovation in the worlds of business and academia.

Web 2.0, a phrase coined by O'Reilly Media in 2004,[1] refers to a perceived second-generation of Web-based services—such as social networking sites, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies—that emphasize online collaboration and sharing among users. O'Reilly Media used the phrase as a title for a series of conferences, and it has since become widely adopted. Though the term suggests a new version of the Web, it does not refer to an update to Internet or World Wide Web technical standards, but to changes in the ways those standards are used. According to Tim O'Reilly, "Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform."[2]. Some technology experts, notably Tim Berners-Lee, have questioned whether the term is meaningful, since many of the technology components of "Web 2.0" have been present since the creation of the World Wide Web

All of these programs link to myriad open APIs--advanced program interfaces that serve as building blocks for new applications--and data on the Web from Amazon (Research), Google (Research), and others. Thus can the information on your desktop be fused with the entire Web through a powerful and increasingly invisible bridge between the two.

It's been a long time -- all the way back to the dawn of desktop computing in the early 1980s -- since software coders have had as much fun as they're having right now. But today, browser-based applications are where the action is. A killer app no longer requires hundreds of drones slaving away on millions of lines of code. Three or four engineers and a steady supply of Red Bull is all it takes to rapidly turn a midnight brainstorm into a website so hot it melts the servers.

One of my favorite business model suggestions for entrepreneurs is, find an old  UNIX command that hasn't yet been implemented on the web, and fix that.  talk and  finger became ICQ,  LISTSERV became Yahoo! Groups,  ls became (the original) Yahoo!,  find and  grep became Google,  rn became Bloglines,  pine became Gmail,  mount is becoming S3, and  bash is becoming Yahoo! Pipes. I didn't get until tonight that Twitter is  wall for the web. I love that.