TweetI had the pleasure of writing an article for the book, Enabling Innovation: Innovative Capability – German and International Views as a follow-up to some work I did with the EU’s International Monitoring Organisation. An interesting aspect of this book is that major articles are written by German researchers and then shorter comments or additions [...]
Filed under: Books, complexity, Work | 2 Comments »
TweetThese days it’s more productive to think of organizations as organisms. Managers become stewards of the living. Their role is to energize people, empower teams, foster continuous improvement, develop competence, leverage collective knowledge, coach workers, encourage collaboration, remove barriers to progress, and get rid of obsolete practices. Living systems thrive on values that go far beyond the machine [...]
Filed under: 21C_Leader, InternetTime, Work | 4 Comments »
TweetI see three major principles for working smarter in networked organizations: Transparency Narration of Work Distribution of Power I spoke about the distribution of power in my last post on the democratization of the workplace. The narration of one’s work is an essential practice that enables this. Hans de Zwart discusses a narrating-your-work experiment that had a [...]
Filed under: Communities, NetworkedLearning, Work | No Comments »
TweetCan your organization work without bosses? In the documentary, Ban the Boss (one hour BBC video) Paul Thomas shows that most organizations can run just fine without bosses, or at least without traditional, hierarchical bosses who tell workers what to do. Gwynn Dyer explained that historically, hierarchies were the result of a communications problem, in Why the [...]
Filed under: Work | 13 Comments »
TweetIn Network Thinking I said that as we learn in digital networks, stock (content) loses significance, while flow (conversation) becomes more important – the challenge becomes how to continuously weave the many bits of information and knowledge that pass by us each day. Conversations help us make sense. But we need diversity in our conversations [...]
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TweetCurtis Ogden at The Interaction Institute for Social Change provides a very good summary of the differences between network-centric and hierarchy-centric thinking, called Network Thinking: Adaptability instead of control Emergence instead of predictability Resilience and redundancy instead of rock stardom Contributions before credentials Diversity and divergence One major challenge in helping organizations improve collaboration and [...]
Filed under: complexity, NetworkedLearning, Work | 4 Comments »
Tweet The main premise of The Hyper-social Organization is that social media, connectivity and always-on technology are enabling what humans do naturally; be very social. The authors on knowledge management: Of course, one of the big challenges for companies is that, unlike information or data, knowledge does not flow easily, as it relies on long-term [...]
Filed under: Books, SocialLearning, Work | 2 Comments »
TweetHere are my notes from the session this afternoon at CSTD 2011 in Toronto. If you need other links or information, just add a comment. I’m glad we had a chance to field test a variation of the improv icebreak activity of equilateral triangles. It seems to have got things going a bit. My slide [...]
Filed under: complexity, Informal Learning, Work | No Comments »
Tweet F.W. Taylor’s Principles of Scientific Management, written in 1911, is still the basis of many of our management practices today. Taylor’s ghost is everywhere. It is only through enforced standardization of methods, enforced adoption of the best implements and working conditions, and enforced cooperation that this faster work can be assured. And the duty of enforcing the adoption of standards and enforcing [...]
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TweetIn the TechCrunch article, What if this is no accident?, Jon Evans looks at the current boom in software engineering jobs in comparison to the lack of jobs elsewhere. He wonders if this is how the new economy will look for a while. It’s beginning to look like we might have entered a two-track economy, [...]
Filed under: 21C_Leader, Technology, Wirearchy, Work | 1 Comment »
