21CLeadership

Scrum in 1 minute
Scrum is about getting back to the time when the company was small and everything was easy and ran smoothly. Back then projects were small, teams were small, releases were small and communication was easy. Best of all, we were efficient.

In Scrum we split our big project into small projects as we work on timeboxed iterations called sprints. We split our big team into small teams (still with all the skills we need) and launch often. If we are more than 20 employees we probably have a problem knowing what the other departments and customers are needing so let's bring someone into the team that can represent them. To help communications from the team to the rest of the company we have our plan and current status visible. The plan is called the sprint backlog and the status is shown on the scrum board. Here is an example:

The economic, social and environmental volatility now facing business means organisations having to operate in a dynamically transforming landscape.

The nature of change itself is transforming. Organisations are now increasingly exposed to dynamic change: change upon change upon change - while dealing with one change, another affects us, then another, and so on. This dynamic change upsets the traditional business paradigm we have been working to over the last few decades.

The BrainYard Lots of presentations

Tom Friedman has penned a thought-provoking oped, "One Country, Two Revolutions."

In discussing the ongoing social media revolution underway in Silicon Valley, Friedman turns to 21st century leadership:

Marc Benioff, the founder of Salesforce.com, a cloud-based software provider, describes this phase of the I.T. revolution with the acronym SOCIAL. S, he says, is for speed - everything is now happening faster. O, he says, stands for open. If you don't have an open environment inside your company or country, these new tools will blow you wide open. C is for collaboration because this revolution enables people to organize themselves within companies and societies into loosely coupled teams to take on any kind of challenges - from designing a new product to taking down a government. I is for individuals, who are able to reach around the globe to start something or collaborate on something farther, faster, deeper, cheaper than ever before - as individuals.

The more connected networks become, the more likely it is that leaders have redundant value. This is one dimension of the leadership crisis today, exacerbated by the fact that the more asset redundant leaders become, the more irrelevant they feel and the more control they exert to restore ego equilibrium. Reality is, in networks leaders can gain unique value in at least two ways. They create unique value when they create a niche of unique value for themselves. And they gain unique value when those in their network intentionally leave them a space of value uniqueness that no one else takes on. This is a huge culture shift to see the value of leaders as equivalent to the uniqueness of their real time knowledge and skills relative to their networks. It is a shift that requires us to question the value of positional power that leaders assume in their leadership roles.

Has the cult of 'leadership' contributed to megalomaniac behaviour that ultimately led to the financial crisis? All of this leadership lark is quite recent. For years we got by with management training, good old sensible stuff about being nice, clear and organised. Then, around the Millennium, the training world went all evangelical about 'Leadership'.Now the last thing you want to do with a bloated ego is feed it a diet of hubris. These guys (and it's mostly guys) lap it up - it turns them into Ken Low-like monsters. When you over-inflate a balloon it floats away and is no longer grounded. They think they're omniscient and omnipotent.

Connected company case studies and examples
50 social media stories worth bookmarking

A collection of E20 case studies and examples

Cases in collaboration

DIA embraces E20

E2o examples and case stories

Peter Kim's wiki of social media examples

Socialtext case studies

ZDNet Zappos case study

This is post 1 in a series about preparing for the future of work and learning. When you jump into a heated pool or get into a warm lake in the middle of a hot day- this usually feels nice, right? What about when you jump into an unheated pool or a cold lake? Is it usually a gets your attention, even if you knew the water was cold. When you think about the future of work, did it ever make you feel like you were jumping into cold water?  If not, you probably haven't considered what this means for you.  It's a big change. Most of us are experiencing the changing workplace environment at some level while others are fully immersed. In order to build your skills or the skills of others for work of the future, you need to understand how the future of work is changing. Here are 19 Resources to help to gain a better understanding of this change.

Great article

It found that 43% of those surveyed described their company's culture as based on command-and-control, top-down management or leadership by coercion-what Mr Seidman calls "blind obedience". The largest category, 54%, saw their employer's culture as top-down, but with skilled leadership, lots of rules and a mix of carrots and sticks, which Mr Seidman calls "informed acquiescence". Only 3% fell into the category of "self-governance", in which everyone is guided by a "set of core principles and values that inspire everyone to align around a company's mission". The study found evidence that such differences matter. Nearly half of those in blind-obedience companies said they had observed unethical behaviour in the previous year, compared with around a quarter in the other sorts of firm. Yet only a quarter of those in the blind-obedience firms said they were likely to blow the whistle, compared with over 90% in self-governing firms. Lack of trust may inhibit innovation, too. More than 90% of employees in self-governing firms, and two-thirds in the informed-acquiescence category, agreed that "good ideas are readily adopted by my company". At blind-obedience firms, fewer than one in five did.

organisations are complex; activities are complex. For some time in middle of the previous century, managers tried to ignore this fact and establish perfect processes. Today, we slowly start to acknowledge the fact, that our work environment is complex, interdependent and constantly changing; we need to work together to create a transparency what is changing and how we can best adopt to new situations.

Gratton outlines five forces that will shape the future pattern of work: Technology (think 5 billion people, digitized knowledge, ubiquitous cloud). Globalisation (think continued bubbles and crashes, a regional underclass, the world becoming urban, frugal innovation). Longevity and demography (think Gen Y, increasing longevity, aging boomers growing old poor, global migration). Society (think growing distrust of institutions, the decline of happiness, rearranged families) Energy resources (think rising energy prices, environmental catastrophes displacing people, a culture of sustainability emerging).

By RACHEL EMMA SILVERMAN

The status-update era is changing the annual performance review.


Peter and Maria Hoey
With many younger workers used to instant feedback-from text messages to Facebook and Twitter updates-annual reviews seem too few and far between. So companies are adopting quarterly, weekly or even daily feedback sessions.

Not surprisingly, Facebook Inc. exemplifies the trend. The social network's 2,000 employees are encouraged to solicit and give small nuggets of feedback regularly, after meetings, presentations and projects. "You don't have to schedule time with someone. It's a 45-second conversation-'How did that go? What could be done better?" says Lori Goler, the Palo Alto, Calif., social-networking company's vice president of human resources. More formal reviews happen twice a year.

For most companies, employee reviews are still an annual rite of passage. Some 51% of companies conduct formal performance reviews annually, while 41% of firms do semi-annual appraisals, according to a 2011 survey of 500 companies by the Corporate Executive Board Co., a research and advisory firm.

And increasing frequency may not make much of a difference if the performance appraisals are ineffective to begin with, say some. One academic review of more than 600 employee-feedback studies found that two-thirds of appraisals had zero or even negative effects on employee performance after the feedback was given. "Why is doing something stupid more often better than doing something stupid once a year?" asks Samuel A. Culbert, a professor at the Anderson School of Management at the University of California, Los Angeles and the co-author of the book "Get Rid of the Performance Review!"

Some firms have found that the traditional once-a-year review is so flooded with information-appraising past performance, setting future goals, discussing pay-that workers have trouble absorbing it all, and inst

IN medicine, the evidence-based movement arose in response to thousands of deaths and billions of wasted dollars that could have been averted by applying proven practices. Similarly, in other fields, the growing pile of studies on the human and financial costs of employee disengagement, management distrust, poor group dynamics, faulty incentive schemes and other preventable damage suggests a need for an evidence-based management movement. Some organizations are leading the way. It's time for many more to follow suit.  

The innovation premium is the proportion of a company's market value that cannot be accounted for from the net present value of cash flows of its current products in its current markets. Put another way, it's the premium the stock market gives a company because investors expect it to launch new offerings and enter new markets that will generate even bigger income streams. We use the innovation premium to rank the world's most innovative companies and this has prompted a number of questions about the methodology.

Innovation is the lifeblood of our global economy and a strategic priority for all CEOs everywhere. We're all familiar with classic cases where revolutionary ideas upended industries and generated enormous wealth: the Apple iPod's outplaying the Sony Walkman; Starbucks' beans and atmosphere flooding out traditional coffee shops; Skype's using a strategy of "free" to unspool AT&T. But how about Reckitt Benckiser Group, the British consumer products giant (Lysol, Woolite, Clearasil), which looks to customers, among others, to find new methods to detect parasites?