Overview: Change & Project Management

The Art of Hosting is a highly effective way of harnessing the collective wisdom and self-organizing capacity of groups of any size.  ... a suite of powerful conversational processes to invite people to step in and take charge of the challenges facing them... better decision-making, more efficient and effective capacity building and greater abi…

"product management in media is the intersection between journalism, user experience, software, data and analytics" Just replace 'media' with government and you've got a manifesto for participative government right there. - The Need For Product Management In Media — Medium

"... management has become so obsessed with the “engagement” of its staff that it now places more importance on it than sales... [because] the components of engagement—employee happiness and commitment to the business—are exactly what drive sales, and therefore the bottom line... the key to this new breed of internal-communications tools... is …

Distributed intelligence means you need to find a social process, not a data-driven solution... You cannot outsource leadership to your analytics group. - Thinking Small: 3 Ways To Remain Creative In A World Of Big Data | Co.Create | creativity + culture + commerce

"Slack is just another stream ... of continuous information that you have to follow. I remembered I found it distractive and stressful because it was so easy to miss out on stuff.... This is what drives Slacks’ success. Because if you don’t follow Slack all the time you do not and cannot take part in the conversation with your team members anym…

Good management and approach can make a real difference. Since it's the company's job to manage interns well, here are seven tips will help you get the most out of your summer interns. - 7 Ways to Make the Most Out of Your Summer Interns | Inc.com

"we have slipped into a new era in which volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity have grown dramatically, to the point that companies that are moving fast enough to thrive in our postnormal times must let go of the crutch of top-to-bottom situational analysis... The organization chart is shrinking because we are slowly recognizing wh…

"If organizations want to enable workers to bring not only their hands but also their heads to work, then jobs need to be redesigned to give people ownership of (1) how they perform tasks, (2) their identity, and (3) their time.... managers complain that their employees don’t think for themselves. Yet ... punish their subordinates for failing …

"Far too many business leaders are... failing to put the necessary muscle behind efforts to promote more women... it is a 3-legged solution: men, women, and organization all have a part to play... there are four things organizations corporate leaders can do to finally, after decades of talk, actually get something done:"

"If employees ... were happier in their workplaces, they also tended to work in business units with higher levels of productivity, profit, retention, and customer satisfaction. This shows a link between how employees feel and how they perform. Are you a manager who wants to create a happier and more productive work environment? Are you a job se…

How many meetings did you attend last week that lacked a specific agenda, started late, and then ended late? How often did you attend a meeting without knowing why you were even there? How many meetings actually resulted in a new idea or an actionable decision? - 3 Steps Toward More Efficient And Valuable Meetings | Fast Company | Business + In…

"In the next five years, millennials will make up half the workforce and 75% of it by 2025... We want to contribute to building something great... with meaning. We’re also talented, driven, and have really high expectations for the companies we join and the type of work we engage in... companies need to ask us what we think and how we feel. Unf…

Meetings can be the biggest waste of time. Combat that perception by encouraging brainstorming, removing chairs, and yes—offering treats. - 5 Ways To Make Your Staff Meetings More Engaging | Fast Company | Business + Innovation

Absolutely superlative rant. Number 1 of 16: “When challenged on your aims and intentions you repeatedly say profit and growth. When you should know beyond any doubt that they’re the by-product of being brilliant at something people want. Err?" - Busted — Just Thinking — Medium

"a great deal of recent research suggests that interpersonal intelligence may be as important in business ... social sensitivity, or being attuned to other’s moods, feelings, and psychological makeup." - How to make groups more productive? Add women. — Work Futures — Medium

"People bond. Barriers dissolve. Connections are made. Trust increases. Knowledge is transmitted. Wisdom is shared ... a deep sense of interdependence is felt... If you are part of an organization, no matter what it's shape or size, it's time for some meaning making ... by creating engaging opportunities for everyone, from mail room to board ro…

If you ever wondered why meetings so often lead to the wrong decision ... "... we are wired in certain ways ... that can block groups from processing information effectively, which leads to bad decisions... Gilbert explains how to use diversity and inclusion to get better results from product ideation efforts... One of the most fundamental …

"In a time of unprecedented challenge, leaders don't just need to lead their companies. They also need to lead themselves. They need strategies for improving their effectiveness while sustaining a sense of professional well-being... In order to survive and thrive, leaders can't just go about business as usual. Business isn't "usual" anymore. It's …

"The problems that most resist solutions are system problems. In a system problem, if you’re part of the system, you’re part of the problem. This illusion of objectivity is often particularly acute in senior leaders, because there’s a tendency for people to tell them what they want to hear." - If you’re part of the system, you’re part of the pr…

"companies are hungry to build employee engagement. At the same time, managers struggle to figure out what works and are reluctant to hand over any autonomy...talent management processes often enforce conformity, legitimize mediocrity and penalize failed attempts at innovative thinking. four Deloitte LLP offices in India... initiated a contest. E…

"Stacy sits down with Google Ventures to share her perspectives on startup hiring, leadership, and more." Also a good example of video journalism, but a comparison between total Reads (as measured usign Medium's womderful metrics) vs number of views of the embedded videos - i.e., do people watch them, or just read the textual summaries? - Manage…

"If you’re embracing online collaboration as a necessary evil — the only way to work with an increasingly dispersed team of global or remote workers, for example — then you’re doing it wrong. Online collaboration is not a second-best substitute for face-to-face work: It’s a complement with its own perks and benefits." - Collaborating Online Is So…

"in the cause of wider employee participation... there’s more to success than just investing heavily in the latest Enterprise 2.0 technology platforms. Large-scale engagement of the workforce requires, first and foremost, a firm grasp of organizational culture and its social dynamics, a psychological understanding of what triggers new behavior, …

"Generation Z (born starting in the mid-90s to the early ’00s... are poised to be somewhat different from the millennials... Filling the talent pipeline has never been so critical now that the United States is facing a skills gap in most industries. Even if you’re a small operation, you can still have a Gen Z internship program. These children ar…

"Most visitors to departmental and agency content want to see what the current position is, so there is a need to manage historical content. Users expect this to be available. In the past there have been different approaches to this. Having a single government website gives us an opportunity to make this consistent, manageable and effective for u…

"While traditional strategy calls for rigorous analysis and critical thinking, design thinking espouses ‘thinking by doing’. The key is to find the sweet spot between the two approaches." Nice exploration of overthinking vs. underthinking: "... overthinking — aka ‘death by analysis’. An obsession with minimizing risk leads to the inability to ma…

"There has been a strong increase in the proportion of workers that are disengaged in the past five years, perhaps doubling ... the costs of this disengagement can be very high... remote workers - those that work somewhere other than where their boss works - are more engaged.... when workers are remote, the leader's behaviors change, and that .…

" the 3D Workforce: Distributed, Decentralized, and Discontinuous... is really a 4D workforce, however, because these is a fourth factor: Disengagement." Good overview of some recent research, with some conclusions such as: "...as companies become more fast and loose with the transition to social business models of operations, employee engag…

"digital transformation... the application (or reapplication) of digital technologies and the restructuring of operations to better engage with customers, the company ecosystem, and the greater marketplace... We have rocketed into a new economy - a new era - where much of what we knew and relied upon ten years ago is being superseded by new ins…

"most digital transformation deployments fall into the 'deploy and pray' category, a minority address known pain points and use cases, whilst only about 20% of projects involve a concerted organisation-wide roll-out aimed at creating a connected company. ... paradigm shift is needed to go beyond just adopting social technologies towards creating a…