Organisational change

"In early July I participated in the 2013 Roundtable on Institutional Innovation sponsored by the Aspen Institute's Communications and Society Program. The Aspen Institute is an educational and policy studies organization that aims "to provide a nonpartisan venue for dealing with critical issues." It holds a variety of seminars, public conferences and other events throughout the year in its Aspen, Colorado and Wye River, Maryland campuses."

A future of project-based work does call for the emergence of new organisational structures to support the activities of the individual contributors. How will this be done and by whom?

Business colonies as temporary collaboration structures in order to deliver a given project. The concept seems simple enough. However, is it really that simple?

The future of work will be about temporary groupings of independent actors to deliver specific projects and the deployment of new organizational structures that will support these activities.

"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."

"Thomas Frey is a futurist. It's his job to predict the future by identifying emerging global trends. What Frey does might sound a little like fortune telling but spotting new trends is an important way of ensuring your business is well positioned for the future. Frey spoke to SmartCompany from the United States ahead of his upcoming visit to Australia for the Ci2012 conference. Here are his seven predictions for the future:"

Chaebol is a family-run conglomerate in South Korea. Such groups have been at the heart of its rapid industrial development over many years, and tower over almost every area of business: from stockbroking to theme parks; from supermarkets to heavy weapons.

When trying to explain new concepts or paradigms, analogies can be a great tool. However, we should avoid using them for carrying the message of the guarantee of future success.

Digital technologies are enabling us to develop systems with huge numbers of interconnected components and sophisticated software that infuses them with seemingly unlimited capabilities. They are penetrating just about every nook and cranny of the economy and of society in general. And, they are profoundly changing the way all organizations operate, as well as our working and personal lives.

Not sure that this is the right path to walk

"Wrangling complexity: the service-oriented company"

The greatest asset any company has is its workforce, yet too many employers fail to motivate their staff, writes management expert Gary Hamel in an edited extract from his new book

A guiding goal in much of my work is the democratization of the workplace. Democracy is our best structure for political governance and I believe it should be the basis of our workplaces as well. As work and learning become integrated in a networked society, I see great opportunities to create better employment models.

Why wouldn't every organization flock to the vision of an agile, transparent, people-centered, and collaborative team? Let's count the reasons.

"In this on-going collaboration debate, too many people view collaboration as a solution to a problem. It is not. Collaboration is the behaviour that emerges in contexts that invite for collaboration."

"Last week, I presented a premise at the Enterprise 2.0 conference that because the costs of technology and human capital have flipped (relatively speaking), people are now the weakest link in organizational value chains."

"Our fifth annual survey on the way organizations use social tools and technologies finds that they continue to seep into many organizations, transforming business processes and raising performance."