I am sure that this may have just happened to everyone out there and on a rather regular basis, too! Specially, if you are a blogger! Just as I was putting together a blog post on the topic of the 40-Hour Work Week (- “The Magic of Sustainable Growth”), which I published a couple of days ago I happened to bump into another really interesting and worth while watching video clip that touched quite a bit on the very same topic that I covered on that article: work life balance, although, like I said in the past, I have grown to be more fond of the concept of Work Life Integration, instead. The video itself comes from the Ignite series (Ignite Philly, this time around) and it’s a rather thought-provoking 5 minute-long inspiring speech by Pam Selle that tries to share with each and everyone of us how whenever we reach the tipping point of stating “Get a life!” we may as well ... 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

There are few best practices for the network era workplace, but definitely many next practices to be developed. A good place to start is with an integrative performance framework that puts formal training and education where they belong: focused on the appropriate 5%.

Jay Cross calls the new performance environment a workscape:

Workscape: A metaphorical construct where learning is embedded in the work and emerges in “pull” mode. It is a fluid, holistic, process. Learning emerges as a result of working smarter. In this environment learning is natural, social, spontaneous, informal, unbounded, adaptive and fun. It involves conversation as the main ingredient. ,,,

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Source: Is Your Job Killing You, OnlineUniversity.net

The productivity of the average worker has skyrocketed thanks to technology, but it comes at the price of a sedentary lifestyle. And mounting research suggests that sitting at your desk for eight hours a day can have a dramatic impact on your health.

The past 40 years have seen a lot of changes to the American lifestyle, including the way we work. People are sitting more, getting less exercise, engaging with computers on a daily basis, and finding new ways to get stressed out. So how has this shift in the way we work affected Americans?

Enter the desk and the fact that less than 20% of all jobs require physical activity. We are quickly becoming a workforce where our fingers get more exercise than any other part of...  Read the article

If you’re not plugged in and running fast at work, you’re falling behind.

Continuous improvement
Business people face more and more novel situations every day. You have to be learning continuously to deal with the onslaught of unfamiliar, complex problems. There’s no longer time to learn things in advance; you have to learn what you need in real time. Leaving work to go learn something is not an option. This is a game changer. ...

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There was a most interesting thread on Twitter today. Bert van Lamoen (@transarchitect) in a series of tweets, said [paraphrasing several]: “Senge’s five disciplines provided instant utility for learning to organizations in 1990, yet learning organizations remain rare to this day. Hierarchy kills all learning. Our social systems are not designed to cope with complexity. Organizational learning is fundamental change. Today’s organization is not fit for organizational learning. Therefore, we need total redesign. Social and transformational architecture encompasses complexity and emergent change.”

In wither the learning organization, I linked to a ... Read the article

Many of us will have by now seen Steve Jobs’ inspirational address to the Stamford University graduates, where he talks about “connecting dots backwards”. This is what I have been doing for the past 18 months. I am now at last, and very thankfully, ready to move into the next phase of the business. This blog posts summarises the toolkit I have just finished creating as a result of all that dot-joining.

Zhou Enlai was supposed to have given as his assessment of the French Revolution of 1789 that “It is too early to tell”. As the evidence on the transformation of Social Business and Enterprise 2.0 working practices emerge slowly through time, I have been looking back at ... Read the article

A couple of years back the folks over at oDesk put together a rather interesting and insightful YouTube video clip around The Future of Work, which lasts for a little bit over 6 minutes, that surely is worth while going through, specially, the last minute and a half, as it would remind plenty of people how close it is to the well known series of the “Did You Know?” videos. The clip comes to ponder about the future of work and how social computing tools are helping redefine the current workplace as we know it. Two years later, it looks like pretty much all of the main key messages from that video, still resonate quite a bit, thus making us all wonder whether things haven’t changed that much after all. You would expect that they may well have, but have they really?

Well, I am not sure what you would think about, whether we have shifted gears and moved one step further, perhaps two, from where we were in...  Read the article

This week I gave the keynote at an invitation-only meeting of senior executives looking at the future of their industry. My role was to bring perspectives on the broader drivers of change in business.

One of the central themes of my keynote was the future of work and organizations. There are of course many facets to this, but one of the fundamentally important ones in considering the future of business and society is in how work is being polarized.

On the one hand, the elites who have outstanding talents or expertise, combined with the ability to collaborate effectively, have extraordinary choices. They can choose the employers who give them the most flexibility, the highest pay, or the greatest work satisfaction, depending on their priorities. They can work freelance for companies anywhere in the world, usually working from...

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