Friday’s Finds

Here are some of the observations and insights that were shared via social media during the past week.

@asplake – “Toyota’s change-management secret: make no distinction between day-to-day management and change management”

“The Dynamic Duo: Collaboration and Chance” by @BenZiegler via @bentrem

We live in two worlds – order and chaos.  In the world of order we plan, reflect, and think about what to do next.  In the world of chaos things happen, we get things done, yet unpredictability persists.  In one world we like to think we are in control. In the other we mingle with increasing complexity, conflict, and uncertainty.

With increased collaboration we are better positioned, through our collective strength and diversity, to respond to whatever chaos throws our way.  Sometimes we should court serendipity, says Ben Casnocha. And anyways, success is random Kare Anderson reminds us.

“little attention is placed on preparing people to deal with the trials and dilemmas associated with success” by @shauncoffey

The benefits of success to the leader and the organisation are obvious.  Less readily apparent is the personal “dark side” of success which revolves largely around three psychological issues outlined by Ludwig and Longenecker (1993:270-271).  These are:
Climbing the success ladder exposes leaders to negative attitudes and behaviours.  There may not be apparent, but nonetheless come with the territory of successful leadership.  Negatives that could be reinforced include unbalanced personal lives, a loss of touch with reality and an inflated sense of personal ability.
Leaders may become emotionally expansive – “their appetite for success, thrills, gratification, and control becomes insatiable”.  They can lose the ability to be satisfied.  They can become personally isolated and lack intimacy with family and friends, losing a valuable source of personal balance.  They “literally lose touch with reality”.
Other factors include stress, fear of failure and the “emptiness syndrome” (“Is this all there is to success?”)  An inflated sense of ego can lead to abrasiveness, close-mindedness and disrespect.

Smiling Buddha Cabaret: The usefulness of draining

Nan-in, a Japanese master during the Meiji era (1868-1912), received a university professor who came to inquire about Zen.

Nan-in served tea. He poured his visitor’s cup full, and then kept on pouring.

The professor watched the overflow until he no longer could restrain himself. “It is overfull. No more will go in!”

“Like this cup,” Nan-in said, “you are full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?”

Here are some of the observations and insights that were shared via social media during the past two weeks.

@jonerp – “Email idea: end “out of office” auto-replies. Instead, the “in-office auto-reply”-“I’m in the office for once- I just might see your email!””

@mattedgar – “An unexpected benefit of long-term blogging is being able to google for my opinions when I forget what they are” +1!

@swardley – “The reason why we need to add and then remove chief [something] officers is because our organisations are not designed around change”

Here are some of the observations and insights that were shared via social media during the past two weeks.

@snowded – “[I have] Yet to see a list of core competences produced by a committee which could not have been done by any practitioner on the back of an envelope.”

@euan – “Been asked to talk about social media metrics – not sure if bloody good conversations with interesting people is what they’re looking for!”

@jurgenappelo – “You should not celebrate failure, you should celebrate learning. If you fail all the time, there’s a chance you’re not learning.”

@C4LPT – “Organisational training is going to become a sideshow; people’s real learning will take place in other places in order to keep themselves up to date.”

@TheCR – Complexity, Simplicity and Why Community Is Difficult for Organizations – by @RHappe

1. Initially what you are doing may land on deaf ears. For a long time. It doesn’t necessarily mean that it will not succeed and it certainly doesn’t mean it is not worthwhile. It just means that it needs low grade care and feeding while people get comfortable with it and understand it.
2. Early success is in changing people’s patterns and behaviors, not in financial gain or cost avoidance.
3. Communities require a lot of individual action to be successful so it is critical that actions be meaningful and small initially.
4. The impact of hundreds of small actions on economic output can be significant.
5. The impact of the collective action would not have been possible with a traditional business plan or model. There are huge opportunities for those individuals and organizations that can cede control and not insist on consolidating 100% of the output.

The Atlantic: The Case for Abolishing Patents (Yes, All of Them) – via @TimKastelle

In plain-speak, the authors are arguing that, yes, the evidence suggests that having a limited amount of patent protection makes countries slightly more innovative, presumably by encouraging inventors to cash in on their great ideas without fear of being ripped off. But patent protections never stay small and tidy. Instead, entrenched players like intellectual property lawyers who make their living filing lawsuits and old, established corporations that want to keep new players out of their markets lobby to expand the breadth of patent rights. And as patent rights get stronger, they take a serious toll on the economy, including our ability to innovate.

Here are some of the observations and insights that were shared via social media this past week.

I am only highlighting one post I came across this week, as I think it is extremely important as an indicator of how work is changing.

Bersin.com: Performance Management As a Part of Daily Life: Work.com Changes the Game – via @C4LPT

But Work.com is more than a performance management system.  It is an integrated part of the Salesforce platform, and as such is located where many employees actually do their work.  Critically, there is no separate system to access.  There is no need for HR to entice employees to use the performance management system.   This is not “performance management” software – it is “work software” – a tool which Salesforce.com hopes will help people work together better.

My Comments

This should be a wake-up call to work support specialists (L&D, OD, HR) that ‘net work’ has to be integrated. For vendors, the days of stand-alone learning, talent, or performance management systems are numbered. It should also be a clear indication that industrial/information age work structures, and the disciplines they begat, are losing. relevance.

If systems like Work.com are integrated with the lines of business, there may be less need for specialized HR practitioners or at least fewer of them. Managers may begin to ask why they need HR, when they can manage 80% of performance management themselves. And PM is just the start. Why not learning management, when the vast majority of learning happens on the job?

We are moving toward a unified performer-facing work support model, one that does not differentiate between HR, OD or L&D. The only differentiation is between those doing the valued work, and those supporting it. With integrated software systems, we can now see who is doing what and how much value they add. Work is becoming transparent, and highlighting the dysfunction of our work function silos, created in a time when information was scarce and connections were few. That time has come to pass.

Here are some of the observations and insights that were shared via social media this past week.

“The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology.” – E.O. Wilson – via @jhagel

“If you want to know who rules over you in society, find out who you are not allowed to criticize.” – Voltaire – via @marciamarcia

“A discovery is said to be an accident meeting a prepared mind.” – Albert Szent-Györgyi, Hungarian physiologist – via @marciamarcia

 Why doesn’t everyone share their knowledge? by @JohnStepper

The biggest barrier is that each department, and very often individual teams, cling to their proprietary knowledge bases. They’ve created systems and processes optimized for tracking activities instead of increasing user satisfaction and the speed of finding answers. (This is particularly true when help desks are outsourced.) And they’re loath to change what they do for the greater good.

Why do people share? by @OscarBerg

In the New York Times science article “Will You Be E-Mailing This Column? It’s Awesome“, author John Tuerney describes how researchers at the University of Pennsylvania spent 6 months studying the most e-mailed articles from New York Times. The researches found that people preferred to share long positive articles on intellectually challenging and engaging topics, especially such that inspired awe. Furthermore, surprising and emotional articles were more likely to be shared.

Interactive competence – by @EskoKilpi

Creative learning is the new productivity. In creative, interactive work, productivity cannot be measured in quantitative terms or as a difference between input and output, but as the speed and quality of creative learning.

The management task is not to better understand people but to better understand what happens between people. Our world is co-created in relations.

Here are some of the observations and insights that were shared via Twitter (and other places) this past week.

“It should be possible to build a city where you can go your whole life without owning a car and not feel deprived.” —Toronto planner Paul Bedford – via @grescoe

“Creativity is not an escape from disciplined thinking. It is an escape with disciplined thinking.” – Jerry Hirschberg – via @BarbaraOrmsby

@euan – A slap in the face

The worst illiterate is the political illiterate. He hears nothing, sees nothing, takes no part in political life. He doesn’t seem to know that the cost of living, the price of beans, of flour, of rent, of medicines, all depend on political decisions. He even prides himself on his political ignorance, sticks out his chest and says he hates politics. He doesn’t know, the imbecile, that from his political non- participation comes the prostitute, the abandoned child, the robber and, worst of all, corrupt officials, the lackeys of exploitative multinational corporations. — Bertolt Brecht

@downes – The Robot Teachers

But here’s where the challenge arises for the education and university system: it was designed to support income inequality and designed to favour the wealthy …

Examine the structure of the traditional university system, especially as instantiated in the United States, but also to a certain degree in Canada and many other nations. Admission is regulated by tuition, and in the most elite institutions, the tuition is the highest. The recent British experiment in voluntary moderation was a failure. Admission in private universities is also enabled by legacy, the result of favours granted by and to alumni of the university. There is in addition a bias in elite universities toward graduates of a small number of preparatory school.

@RogerSchank – Teaching Minds: How cognitive science can save our schools Note: I can definitely relate

Academic subjects are irrelevant to real learning. They are not irrelevant to the education of academics of course. But, how many people really want to become experts in the academic fields?

@JohnnieMoore – A few thoughts on peer-to-peer networks in meetings – Note: I have had similar thoughts about meetings.

In practice, one of my beefs with Q and A is that it purports to introduce interactivity to meetings but is often deadly dull. Generally after a speaker has already gone on too long, the more fidgety members of the audience need to do something different, and that may take the form of an overlong question that actually is more annoying to much of the audience than the speaker has been. What would often be much better is a complete break in the pattern. Have you noticed the energy level soar when we break for drinks? I don’t think it’s just the liquids.

Here are some of the observations and insights that were shared via Twitter this past week.

@GeorgeMonbiot: “The “self-made man” fallacy is essentially psychopathic: denies the role of and need for other people.”

“Theatre companies don’t talk of their actors as ‘human resources’ – none of them would work for them if they did. ~ Charles Handy.” via @CharlesJennings

Gary Wise: An Evolving Ground Zero for Training Solutions – via @tmiket

“A cool infographic from @atlassian that shows being productive at work is harder than it seems”, via @DanielPink – email is culprit #1

 #itashare

Here are some of the observations and insights that were shared via Twitter this past week.

How Narrating Your Work Helps You Become More Effective by Saving Precious Time – by @elsua

Basically, social networking tools like blogging, or microblogging, that Bertrand mentioned above as examples, to open up our interactions, to free ourselves from the email and meetings yokes, to become more transparent on what we do, because as he mentioned on that article he put together, the more open and transparent we become in the workplace working out loud the much easier it would be for everyone else to help you when you would need it. This is, exactly, what I have been advocating for myself for a long while, along the lines of this quote: “How can I help you, if I don’t know what you are doing? How can I help you, if I don’t know you, your work, and what you are trying to achieve? Help me please to understand your work, so that I can do my fair bit and help out where I can”.

App.net is just an identity provider – via @pevenasgreenwood

App.net doesn’t provide decentralization. If one company has access over all of your “social media data” that’s not decentralized.

What we really need is an open standard that uses an also open protocol to manage all this data. If we take a look at E-Mail Servers, that’s could be one way to built a decentralized “Social Grid” that doesn’t depend on one company.

Copyright v creditright by @JeffJarvis via @DavidGurteen

* When copyright changes, the idea of plagiarism changes. As I said in the Medium post, the old sin was not rewriting enough; the new sin is not attributing *and* linking. All newspaper and magazine articles should carry footnotes to their sources. I learned that ethic of linking in blogs and the practice of footnoting in writing Public Parts. There’s every reason that other media should take it up. Readers deserve it. Sources and creators deserve it. The record deserves it.

* When creditright takes over, then fair comment becomes a different beast. No longer do we fight over how much — how long an excerpt – is necessary and fair for comment. Now, the more comment the better. Just credit.

The Supreme Court of Canada Speaks: How To Assess Fair Dealing for Education by @mgeist

While the Court provides guidance on all aspects of fair dealing, its decisions have also articulated three guiding principles to assist with the analysis.

“fair dealing is a users’ right that must not be interpreted restrictively”

“technological neutrality requires that, absent evidence of Parliamentary intent to the contrary, we interpret the Copyright Act in a way that avoids imposing an additional layer of protections and fees based solely on the method of delivery of the work to the end user.”

“Persons or institutions relying on the s. 29 fair dealing exception need only prove that their own dealings with copyrighted works were for the purpose of research or private study and were fair.”

Here are some of the observations and insights that were shared via Twitter this past week.

@DalaiLama – “We need an approach to ethics which makes no recourse to religion and can be equally acceptable to those with faith and those without.”

@cgosimon – “‘Lessons Learned’ is a huge misnomer. It implies the lesson has been actually learnt rather than the problem documented.”

@JeremyScrivens – “So many of my HR colleagues are being forced to work in risk adverse cultures. Back end compliance has taken over from creativity.”

@euan – “Head of internal communications too often means Head of meaning neutering!” Meaning Matters: We make the very documents that matter the most, less trustworthy by appearing to make them more objective.

How Not to Steal People’s Content on the Web – via @RobinGood

So to clear up any confusion and ensure you (and anyone you do business with) is following proper internet etiquette, this post will outline proper methods of source attribution on the internet to guarantee the right people get credit for their hard work and ideas. It’s just the polite way to do business on the internet!