The average time that a company spends in the S&P 500 is 15 years, continuously trending downward over the past 80 years. In fact, as recent as 10 years ago, the average lifespan was...] Read the article

Mary Meeker delivered her increasingly famous annual internet trends report and analysis this morning at the D10 Conference

Below are the highlights. The impressive 112 page deck is below.

Mobile’s Hyper Trajectory – still with room to grow
- Tablet Growth Exponential
- iPhone set new records, Android Smartphones growing exponentially faster

Re-imagining EVERYTHING

- Several tangible examples of the re-wiring of...  Read the article

Mark Fidelman recently published a piece on Forbes entitled, “Microsoft’s View of the Future Workplace is Brilliant, Here’s Why“.

I’m not sure if Mark wrote the title or whether Forbes editors were in charge, but it really doesn’t do the post justice.

The second half of the piece is where the true brilliance is … if you’re someone like me who is passionate, fascinated and somewhat dogged about the future of work, and how it is made up of open leadership, enterprise 2.0 and connected learning.

Mark states:

I can say with confidence that the workplace has to change dramatically in order to remain effective.

From there, he outlines 10 key reasons why. You should have a read, it really is good stuff.

From my vantage point, (and what my book is trying to depict) our organizations are built on 19th century learning styles coupled by ...

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In complex environments, weak hierarchies and strong networks are the best organizing principle. One good example of complexity that we can try to fathom is nature itself. Networks thrive in nature. As Howard Bloom stated in a speech at Yale University:

One the many lessons bacteria teach with their colonies of trillions is this. When it comes to groups, Nature does not favor tribes, she favors size … She favors humongous social groups that network their information so well that they form a high-powered collective intelligence, a group brain. ...

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I’ve been in the Enterprise 2.0/Social Business space for almost 5 years now, and have been both on the customer and vendor side of the table. What most people are guilty of, is really not knowing what the heck they want to do. I was guilty of it too. I thought Improving Collaboration and Breaking down silos were great business problems to solve. It was until recently that I started focusing around the business value of Enterprise Social that it hit me. Most people talk in jargon and have very little insight into what the underlying business problems are that they are trying to solve. Don’t get me wrong, they know their business problems, but in most cases haven’t connected the dots between problem and solution. Why? Because it takes a lot of analysis and thought to develop that understanding and most of us lack the time to do it. ... Read the article

For some time now, I’ve been trying to identify the thread that ties together all the different topics I write about here on AuthenticOrganizations. Other than the fact that they interest me, what is the underlying theme that links topics as different as:

• how social technologies change organizations,
• why meritocracies hurt women,
• action branding and authentic identity,
• work-life solutions,
• $800 chairs,
• ponies in the snow,
• Etsy,
• progressive organizational movements, and
• communities of commerce?

After hashing it out with colleagues (thanks to to Cali, Deb, Whitney, and Anne) the link seems to be emerging.

All of these topics have to do with ‘building positive capacity’ in individuals, organizations, and economic networks. They all have to do with building a ‘boost’ into some part of the individual/organizational/community economy....  Read the article

Tuesday's announcement from SAP ended months of discussion on who will buy cloud collaborative commerce vendor Ariba. As I've said a few times, most of the larger pure-play cloud vendors are getting a look by traditional large software application vendors, who need to quickly build out a cloud application portfolio. The offer, $4.3B, represents a significant premium of 106X trailing 12 month Ebitda, dwarfing the industry median for software acquisitions from 2002 to today of 16X. The price represents a 20% premium on Ariba's closing price on 5/21 but is considerably less than the 52% premium it paid for SuccessFactors last Fall.

Even though SAP executives have consistently derided Oracle ... Read the article

I spent the past week in San Francisco attending Netsuite's annual user conference, SuiteWorld. As with most software conferences there was the usual barrage of announcements including new features, new partners and refined strategies. Of course SAP also held its Sapphire conference at the same time, so you may have had a hard time making it through all the announcement noise to see what was important from Netsuite (I'll leave the SAP Sapphire commentary at this point to my colleagues).

In the Cloud ERP arena Netsuite, the first full SaaS ERP system, continues to raise the competitive bar and deliver key functionality to its rapidly growing customer base. Last year at its first SuiteWorld conference Netsuite articulated a strategy that focused on several vertical variants and... Read the article

For the past two and half years at my real job as the head of learning and collaboration, we’ve been early adopters of a virtual world product called AvayaLive Engage, developed by a company named Avaya.

It was formerly known as Web.Alive, and although I’m not a fan of the name change, that’s about the only negative comment I have with the product.

If you’re unfamiliar with virtual worlds, you are missing ...

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Emotional contagion is a fact of life. It means that our moods and even physical health are created in interaction with other people. We tilt either to the positive or tilt to the negative as a result of our relations, and the further relations, the people that we relate with have. It is a chain of contagion that goes far beyond the horizon. This is why we can no longer see our minds as independent and separate but as thoroughly social. Our mental life is co-created in a larger and larger interconnected network. What we have called the individual mind is something that arises continuously in relationships between people.

Our social interactions also play a role in shaping our brain. We know now that repeated experiences sculpt the synaptic connections and rewire our brain. Accordingly, our relationships gradually frame the neural circuitry. Being chronically depressed by others or being emotionally nourished and enriched has lifelong impacts.

Mainstream thinking sees the social in social business as a platform...  Read the article