what's usually meant by "collaboration" is 1) plenty of ad-hoc meetings and 2) open-plan offices that increase the likelihood that such meetings take place... open-plan offices... are productivity sinkholes... collaboration tends to penalize the competent who end up doing most of the work. A recent study published in Applied Psychology has now co…

EUrope’s success in eliminating mobile roaming charges may be the first “data4policy” case study where the data was website traffic, and illustrates the rewards of allowing innovation to flourish at the edges of large organisations.

Venting my spleen a little over on Medium.

becoming a learning organization was nothing like winning a marathon ...cultivating an award-winning orchard... nurturing systems and culture to produce meaningful results... We embarked on a systematic and phased approach to cultivating the organization we all wanted.

not necessarily easy to get buy-in from the organization... different parts of the organization are responsible for their own little bits so you can’t always do it within your own team.

as CEO... your power and privilege leave you insulated... from information that might challenge your assumptions and allow you to perceive a looming threat or opportunity. Ironically, to do what your exalted position demands, you must in some way escape your exalted position... at firms that are highly successful innovators, leaders are especiall…

Most of us aren't futurists, and futurists aren't oracles. They simply try and make some sense of what's coming—not hard and fast predictions, just possibilities.... there are a few ways companies can get better at predicting not just what changes may be around the corner, but how they'll affect them once those disruptions arrive. Making everyone…

“We want to believe that we are thinking, rational people and on occasion tangle with emotion... The truth is we are emotional beings who on occasion think.”... Holacracy has been criticized for putting a disproportionate focus on process... pushing Zappos employees to operate in a way that goes against their very human nature... The overwhelming …

the increasingly collaborative nature of modern science. Perhaps nothing captures this dichotomy better than the story of the Higgs discovery... Almost 3,000 people qualify as authors on the key physics papers ATLAS produces... easier to guard against bias in interpreting the data The depth and breadth of this effort transform the act of discov…

Score 1 “My management culture is fucked up” point for each of the following:... You know what costs a lot of time? When good people quit.... Defined levels and career paths take work to develop. But they’re a straightforward way to give people mastery goals and direction. Ever look at some company getting it right and think, “How did they hire …

How organisations enshrine collective stupidity and employees are rewarded for checking their brains at the office door... Smart young things joining the workforce soon discover that, although they have been selected for their intelligence, they are not expected to use it. ... After a few years of experience, they will find that the people who g…

it only takes few weeks before you receive a full diagnostic report providing you with new levers to accelerate the development of your organization. Your employees invest less than 10 minutes completing a user-friendly questionnaire that they can do from their work or home computer, tablet or smartphone – we will do the rest.

Work management is a term that has emerged in recent years as task management tools were enhanced with various social communication capabilities... The primary distinction here is the degree of emphasis for task-centric versus message-centric tools.

TL;DR: because you think it’s a solution in itself, while it’s merely a framework for organizations to create them in an efficient and controlled manner.

an edge is not just a term for advantage itself; it can also be the place where you can find that advantage... the outer rim that frames what you do and separates it, quite conveniently, from what you don’t... When you proceed beyond this border in business, the main thing that changes is risk. they are the places where the inside and the outside…

a new role that I believe will become more and more important: the Minister of Culture.WARNING: REAL CONTENT AHEAD! This essay links to most of the best research on culture. ... I’ll also show how to generate a culture score for your company and improve it. ... a full 3-6 month course on culture ... Don’t think of this as a long post — think of it…

I am done with attending badly run meetings and if you have any sense so should you be... running a good meeting comes down to the following: - I am done with bad meetings — Medium

The number and diversity of communications skills needed to implement a communications strategy never stops growing. How are you organising them?

Practices, research, and ideas from Google and other organizations to put people first. re:Work is organized around some of the biggest ways you can make an impact in your workplace. Each subject contains guides, with tools and insights, for addressing specific challenges.

If a 100 new alluring little foxy ideas, insights and observations hit you every week, and can pick out the 1 that is worth responding to, you're a foxhog... the foxhog can live in a highly uncertain environment, and be responsively engaged within it, yet create a high-certainty execution context... This ability to turn uncertainty into cer…

One reason for peaking turns out to be success. Success means more employees, more meetings and more compromise. Success means more pressure to expand the market base and to broaden the appeal to get there. Success means that stubborn visionaries are pushed aside by profit-maximizing managers. - Seth's Blog: Peak Mac

In this week’s edition, two new social media products in one week; a few good longreads for the weekend; and more stuff for your online toolbox.

Huge longform exposé - don't know whether to be impressed, amused or horrified: "... what did it mean for an online retailer with annual sales of more than $1 billion, that fills 280,000 orders per week, to be “self-organized”?... Holacracy is ... just one example of a growing movement... that seeks to apply insights derived from evolutionar…

People don’t leave companies. They leave managers — it’s their number one reason to leave... Modern business structures are built on a fundamental system of mistrust, division, and antagonism I call LCD management — managing to the lowest common denominator... companies of all sizes, in every industry, have operated without managers for decades…

There is a growing consensus among top executives that gender diversity is both an ethical and a business imperative. Yet progress is painfully slow... we have committed publicly, through the United Nations’ HeForShe initiative and the 30% Club,3 to some ambitious gender goals for our firm over the next five years—ones that won’t be trivial to …

A great manager is someone that pushes you to fulfill your own potential. What you if you could do that for yourself? ... ... develop a strong understanding of your areas for growth and regularly invite ... feedback on your work? Would your team mates be willing to hold you accountable ... What if you invited coworkers to surface tensions direc…

The absence of hierarchy does not necessarily mean no structure. - Holacracy vs. Hierarchy vs. Flat Orgs — Holacracy — Medium

Companies where leaders don't empower their teams are like merry-go-rounds: plenty of movement, but stuck in place. One of my biggest failures as a leader came just as I thought I was excelling. I judged my worth based on how many decisions I was involved in, how many meetings I sat in on, and how people checked with me first for approval. On t…

Self-management builds on the foundation of transparency. I don't think self-management works without being transparent ... we're now moving to a model where small teams own specific areas, and people don't need to worry about fixing and contributing to each and every problem in the company... the more self-managed you are as a company the m…

"A large part of corporate economic activity today is still designed to accomplish what high market transaction costs prevented earlier. But the world has changed... coordination can be performed without intermediaries with the help of new technologies. Digital transparency makes responsive coordination possible... Apps can now do what manag…