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In The Social Psychology of Organizing, Karl Weickexposed the theory of enactment, stating that organizations were fundamentally an abstraction of the reality, essentially brought to life through management’s narrative. In that sense, changing the way we work requires much more than technology and the empowerment of knowledge workers. Taking a broader perspective, and looking at organizations, not only as a production and profit-making machines, but as center of a part of human activities mainly taking place in cities, sheds a different light on the role and nature of what we call social businesses.

While trade was an important part of the wealth of cities during Antiquity, we had to wait until the XIth century for economic exchanges to regain importance after few centuries of...  Read the article

Víctor García-Morales, Francisco Lloréns-Montes and Antonio Verdú-Jover published a paper in the British Journal of Management (December, 2008, Vol. 19 Issue 4) entitled, “The Effects of Transformational Leadership on Organizational Performance through Knowledge and Innovation”.

In it they set out to prove the following hypotheses:

• Transformational leadership will be positively associated with knowledge slack (prior knowledge), absorptive capacity, tacitness, organizational learning and innovation.
• Knowledge slack will be positively associated with absorptive capacity.
• Absorptive capacity will be positively associated with tacitness.
• Tacitness will be positively associated with organizational learning.
• Organizational learning will be positively associated with innovation.
• Tacitness, organizational learning and innovation will be positively associated with performance.
• Size will be positively associated with strategic variables that affect organizational performance.

In summary and at its core, the authors wished to ... Read the article

Last week Yammer and Ultimate Software announced a partnership that combines the Yammer enterprise social network with Ultimate's UltiPro HCM. Combining the deep employee profile from the corporate HCM system with a real time social collaboration tool is an important step in building out a complete enterprise social network, connecting employees to each other and to partners and customers. A modern HCM system contains critical workforce intelligence that starts with recruitment and includes job history, compensation and payroll, performance, skills / talent and career development data...all the relevant employee transaction data (system of transaction). The system of ... Read the article

Introduction

The recent series of blog posts about the campus / learning workplace are the result of my growing awareness of the importance of the workplace for knowledge creation through the work I have been doing in recent years with Dr Marie Puybaraud and the Johnson Controls Global Mobility Network.

Work-based learning

I have another string to my bow. I headed up a team, over a decade ago, responsible for establishing and growing a UK university’s work-based learning Master’s degrees across all faculties.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What this means is that rather than feeding students into pre-designed course, our starting point was a strategic thing the student’s business needed to do. We helped them scope a strategic objective and create a high-level...

 

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This post was inspired by a discussion I had with Bert Sandie who is the Director of Technical Excellence at Electronic Arts.

It seems as though nowadays everyone is talking about “gamification” for the enterprise.  For those of you not familiar with the concept, gamification is all around taking game mechanics and concepts and applying them to a business setting.  Think of something like an airline loyalty program or a customer service forum where participants are rewarded and recognized for their contributions but applied to the workplace .  Although we throw around the gamification terms haphazardly, the reality is that there is a lot that is required to understand how games work and what makes...  Read the article

When I present social business as my passion, I’m often amused by the fact that the average listener assumes I’m talking about Yammer, Facebook or Sharepoint. I suppose I can see, from their perspective, why they think social platforms equates to being a social business.

It’s easy to become distracted by shiny, new tools and platforms, but these are just delivery channels. As I’ve learned, and I’m sure as you have as well (if you’re reading this post), being a social business is so much more than just the tools or delivery channels. Rather, if you’re truly looking to use social tools to transform your organization, then your purpose should be based on human ingredients: employees.

Social within a business may have began with Marketing and IT, but we’ve reached a point where it’s clear that Human Resources is the GLUE in creating social programs that are not only relevant and adoptable to employees, but ones that transform your organization and its culture.

I emphatically believe that a social workplace considers employee behavior in order to create a truly collaborative and  integrated... Read the article

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Co-evolution has always played an important role in the history of humankind, specially when it comes to the complex relationships existing betweentechnology and social behaviors. The social tools sweeping over the web and entering at increasing pace into our organizations are no exception. But evolution is neither linear, nor always a positive-sum game. Social business, in its present acceptation of defining a new way to get work done, might actually have reached a crossroad.

“Give me a lever long enough and a fulcrum on which to place it, and I shall move the world.” This famous quote from Archimedes illustrates the dual nature of technological evolution: while giving a theoretical and scientific framework to the...  Read the article

If you have been reading the last few articles I have posted over here in this blog, over the course of the last few months, you may have noticed how, as of late, I have become a whole lot more critical (Hopefully, in a constructive manner) around the whole subject of Social Business and Enterprise 2.0, in general, and, although I’m still a strong believer in the whole movement (I even think we cannot longer go back and do something else. It’s changed us for good!), I am starting to question the validity and merit of a good number of motives from companies to become successful social businesses, because in reality they aren’t. They are just grabbing the wrong end of the stick thinking and hoping it will work out eventually, when we all know it won’t, and get away with it.

Well, it’s now time to up the game again and here’s another one of those thinking out loud reflections that’s been in my mind for a long while regarding Social Business and which I’m now more and more convinced it may be destroying our current business environment as we know it, more than... Read the article

I’m not going deny it… I’m quite fond of the folks at Awareness Inc. Not just because they afforded me the awesome opportunity of personally visiting and meeting the folks running the  Super Bowl Social Media Command Center, but because they also put together some phenomenal reports (see theState of Social Media Marketing).

In their most recent whitepaper, they explore something nearer and dearer to my own passion: engagement.

“Engagement” is a hot word these days but what does it really mean? Why is it important? How do you drive it? How do choices such as the day and time of a post affect interaction with content, engagement and loyalty? This paper explor...  Read the article

Why doesn’t every piece of cake come with two forks?

There’s no fixed reason why the cake can only come with one fork. But, having only one fork is an obstacle to sharing, even for the most generous of potential dessert-sharers.

Why not bring me a second fork, to make it easy for me to share?

Even better, why not serve every piece of cake with two forks?

Why not make it easy for everyone to make sharing their default behavior? ...

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