This is a sequel of Edgar Schein Organizational Culture and Leadership review, focussing on the sole Chapter 20. In this chapter, the great man discuss Learning Culture and the Learning Leader.

Schein shares Gary Hamel points of view regarding today’s market and economy : we have no idea what tomorrow’s world will be except that “It will be different, more complex more fast paced and more culturally diverse. This means that...  Read the article

Google glass likely becomes a midway or introductory step towards the rapid growth of more tightly coupled human and ...  Read the article

Business Model Innovation as Wicked Problem

This post is the first of a two-parts article on innovation and social business co-written with Ralph-Christian Ohr (@ralph_ohr) and cross-posted from collaborativeinnovation.org.

We live in an age where emergent technologies continue to have massive effects on business and society. Rising complexity requires companies and economies to cope with increasingly interlocking systems. If we keep on considering systems in a traditional, isolated way, this would lead to a totally locked view of business. This new hyper-connected nature of information entails an unprecedented change in business and societal environments. One major consequence for companies is the imperative to learn to anticipate those changes as well as to successfully adapt to them, or being at risk of disappearing.

The business model is the new unit of design

The life time of business models is declining. Organizations are forced to reinvent themselves more and more frequently in order to survive and thrive. This implicates the creation and pursuit of new businesses while maintaining and improving existing businesses – sustainable success depends on a proper integration of evolutionary and revolutionary innovation.

A recent Arthur D. Little study has found...

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“Increasingly, strategic advantage for corporate institutions will hinge on privileged positions in relevant concentrations of high-value knowledge flows and the adoption of practices required to participate in and profit from these knowledge flows”.

By these words, John Hagel, John Seely Brown and Lang Davidson define in The Power of Pull what they call the second wave of the Big Shift. Their impressive concept and research have already been thoroughly and brilliantly commented. Social business, or whatever we call it, has the potential to drive us through the necessary changes to harness flows of knowledge and take fully advantage of human collaboration and creativity.

Are we stuck in a document-based view of the firm?

But to fulfill this promise, thus to trigger the third wave of...

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Last week in San Francisco the world of everything cloud gathered for what, at least according to host Salesforce.com, was the largest tech conference ever. Whether its true or not, it was very well attended, well planned and executed nicely. Dreamforce is always an energetic event and this year was no exception, with celebrity guests like Sir Richard Branson, who did a fireside chat with CEO Marc Benioff and former Secretary of State and retired Gen Colin Powell, entertainment like MC Hammer as part of the opening keynote and Red Hot Chili Peppers, and high profile Salesforce customers like... Read the article

I spent the first part of this week at VMworld, mostly catching up on two acquired products, SocialCast and Zimbra, as well as the Horizon product line. I continue to be impressed with the feature set and depth of the SocialCast product and I have to say that the strategy and direction for the product are really shaping up nicely (more on that in a minute). Along with the barrage of press releases from VMware this week, you may have noticed an announcement from IBM about another acquisition, Kenexa. Now IBM acquiring another application company has become pretty common over the past few years, but this acquisition, I think is interesting more for the implications of strategy than just from the additional assets added to the IBM solution portfolio.

Over the past few years I've focused quite a bit on some emerging technology that falls loosely into the category of social applications. We've gotten more... Read the article

Crowd funding is a growing force in starting and/or growing small businesses or creative projects. The concept is simple, put together a compelling story and get people interested enough to pledge an amount of money in return for "something".  The story is publicized on some online community and hopefully interesting enough to go viral on several public networks. Kickstarter is arguably the best known crowd funding site, but its not the only one. There's RocketHub, invested.in, PleaseFund.Us, Indigogo, Pledge Music and I'm sure a few more that I haven't managed to track down. The business models differ a bit but in general the concept is pretty similar. ... Read the article

You may remember how in previous articles that I have put together over here in this blog I have mentioned how, lately, I am going through one of those stages, where instead of participating rather actively in a good number of various different social networking sites, I’m now more inclined towards plenty of reading and listening what’s happening out there, then do a bunch of more reading (books, articles, white papers, etc. etc.), followed by lots of additional self-reflection and learning on the sides from watching video clips, mainly of conference event recordings available on YouTube and, eventually, come back to the blog to reflect on some of the stuff I have learned in the process.

Yes, indeed, in short, I am spending now more time blogging than in the usual social networking sites, the so-called message boards. And today has been no different. Specially, since I have been catching up on a couple of recent keynote speaker sessions that have totally blown my mind, since my head is still spinning with dozens of ideas and I just can’t help...

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In the past you may remember how time and time again I have mentioned how one of the main use cases from a successful Social Business would eventually be that one ofcustomer service and customer support, although over the course of time you may have noticed how my experienceshave been very lacking in this regard. So, instead of giving up on it altogether a long while ago I decided to keep pushing for it, because I knew it that at some point it would click and that would be the day where we may be witnessing that tipping point for that use case to become a reality. Well, I think that day has arrived. Today. And that company that has finally understood what a social business is all about is one that I never expected that it would be coming around, as seen on this blog a few times already. That social business with a success story on providing excellent customer service and support is Movistar. Yes, you are reading it right.Movistar!

I have always been saying that the day both telcos and airlines, along with government, amongst a couple of others, start embracing social... Read the article

I consider a Social Business to be one which harnesses the power of social networking technology to aid collaboration and decision making in organizations. I see this as the modern extension of Knowledge Management which was seen in the early part of this century as the consequence of better database solutions, the advent of the Web as we now know it and a way to finally make our work “smarter”. But will Social Business disappear like Knowledge Management, “Knowledgebases”, “Groupware” and other solutions like it in the past?

In the late nineties many computer systems were still focused on making electronic versions of previously physical processes. The emergence of good-quality scanning solutions and processing systems from the likes of Kofax..

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