This year I have been drawn significantly into the retail industry, being the lead technology advisor for a major study on the long-term future of shopping centers, and giving keynotes at a number of public and in-house retail industry events on topics including the future of retail shopping districts and social media in retail. We are now considering creating a detailed report on strategies for the future of retail next year.The current edition of Harvard Business Review includes an excellent article titled The Future of Shopping, which echoes many of the themes we are seeing. Its frame of ‘omnichannel retail’ is... Read the article

Cathy N. Davidson has studied the way we make sense and think. Her claim is that we often end up in problems when we tackle important issues together. This happens “not because the other side is wrong but because both sides are right in what they see, but neither can see what the other does”. In normal daily conditions, it may be that we don’t even know that other perspectives exist outside of our own. We believe we see the whole picture from our point of view and have all the facts. Focus however means selection and selection means blind spots leading to (attention) blindness. We have a partial view that we take as the full picture.

This is one of the reasons why people in companies are often stuck in narrow, repetitive and negative patterns that provide them with... Read the article

After looking at the way people work, I realized that Collaboration always begins with a search that is performed by a person looking for help or providing it. Collaboration takes place when people from different units work together on a common task. In all cases collaboration involves people – the collaborators. At all times by streamlining our collaborative processes, we impact our company’s bottom line, through innovation, efficiency and better customer service. ...

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Businesses talk about speed, but they don’t take advantage of it

Organizations that don’t embrace new ways of operating and radically different approaches to corporate learning will not survive for three reasons:

1. We’re witnessing a dizzying rate of change. Business people are being overwhelmed by the pace of progress and the explosion of knowledge.
2. There are denser and denser interconnections afoot. Everything is getting hooked up to everything else. This increases complexity and...

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Following my recent post on the case for a non-training approach (NTA) to workplace learning and the launch of my NTA website, I’ve received quite a bit feedback and read a number of blog posts and comments about it. So I thought I would plot all these reactions on the learning technology adoption curve that my Internet Time Alliance (ITA) colleague, Harold Jarche and I produced last year (which is an adaptation of the one originally produced by Geoffrey Moore).

Firstly, just in case it is not clear, this chart plots organizations along the curve in terms of their use of learning technologies but ...

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Social media is playing an ever increasing role as part of the enterprise collaboration strategy. To include social media as part of their strategy organizations need to:

Understand the social universe

To understand the organization’s relation to social media requires understanding the social media universe at least on a high level. This easier said than done, since the social media universe is changing, growing and learning fast. Enterprises should get involved now.

Here’s a tool by Brian Solis and Jess3 to help with the first step... 

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Last month I attended Forrester's Content & Collaboration Forum 2011. The Forum explored what the “current demand for more portable, social workplace experiences means for your workplace strategy.” It shared the “latest trends in technology adoption and how firms forge better business outcomes from a more mobile, social, and virtual workforce.” I had a chance to speak one on one with Leslie Owens. She spoke at this event the next day and here are my session notes (Forrester's Leslie Owens on Harnessing the Voice of the Employee). p(Leslie’s expertise includes: enterprise search, semantic tools, information classification, and taxonomies and I have covered... Read the article

The Training Department (aka the L&D dept) has traditionally focused on designing, developing, delivering and managing instruction – in the form of courses, workshops, e-learning and other training events.  In  fact “a course” in some form or other has now become  the de facto solution to any performance problem in an organisation – despite the fact that many of my Internet Time Alliance colleagues (and others) have spoken about its inadequacies in today’s world, and that courses have little impact on performance.

What is more, although Jay Cross and others have ...

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As you know I have dealt with listening activity and its essential role in a Social CRM strategy (just to refresh your memory you can read here and here) many times and I’m absolutely convinced that every company need to set the technological and organizational infrastructures that can enable market insight (just as I was and am still convinced about gathering and analyzing customer feedbacks flowing through traditional touchpoints like IVR, email, phone call, survey, web form and so on).

Normally you read about well-known guidelines and approaches that tell you how to capture  and analyze industry/sector conversations or direct ones about you and your competitors; and everything starts with a wise choice of keywords and a good set of Boolean operators maybe shared with domain experts. That’s really great and it’s the first main layer on which Owyang’s Social CRM use cases are based on.

But I think something is missing especially considering that ... Read the article

Source: Association of Corporate Counsel, Mary E. Windham, Labor & Employment attorney, Womble Carlyle Sandridge & Rice

Though the National Labor Relations Act has been around since the 1930s, its recent application to a relatively new sphere of activity, the virtual world of social media, has created a host of uncertainties.  Are employees’ posts about their workplaces and colleagues on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media protected speech, or the stuff that may rightfully subject employees to discipline for violation of company policy prohibiting disparagement, discrimination, or defamation?  Though the National Labor Relations Board (“NLRB”) has yet to issue a decision on social media policy, over the last nine months it has aggressively publicized complaints and settlements in connection with cases involving employer rules concerning social media use and employee discipline.  Employers – both unionized ...  Read the article