Sparkspring Avatar

The new norm is the virtual model. Everyone’s a contractor, working for themselves, whether you’re doing so as a pinion in a huge multinational or working a web start-up out of your dorm room.

[…]

Not everyone is cut out for it. The people who will fit best in your new organization will be young unattached millennials. Outsource non-value added work, whether it’s to another small business or an individual.

Euan Semple - Google+ - “Social media command centre” - is just so at odds with…

google.com

Works at help­ing organ­i­sa­tions, and more impor­tant­ly the peo­ple in them, get their heads around the web

Scripting News: Blogging 2.0.

scripting.com

I wrote a piece in August 2012 which I posted on Medium entitled We Could Make History, in which I proposed that we get together and create a new API to connect authoring tools to publishing environments.At the time I thought it was a long shot, b…

WorkFlowy for Teaching Music

workflowy:

Paul Wood is a violin teacher who uses WorkFlowy in his day job. He has now started experimenting with WorkFlowy to keep track of lessons and feedback for his students, and he’s blogged about it.

This post is part of a series focusing on how different types of people use WorkFlowy. Do you have an interesting use for WorkFlowy? Blog about it, let us know, and we’ll share it.

If you never go to work, you never leave work.
Doc Searls Weblog · Bringing “Personal Cloud” to Marketharvard.edu
In Cloud mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy: Do con­sumers care if it’s called cloud? Mada­lyn Stone blogs an exis­ten­tial ques­tion for read­ers of Search­Cloud­Provider. She begins, “Though the ideas behind cl …

Doc Searls Weblog · Bringing “Personal Cloud” to Market
harvard.edu

In Cloud mar­ket­ing strat­e­gy: Do con­sumers care if it’s called cloud? Mada­lyn Stone blogs an exis­ten­tial ques­tion for read­ers of Search­Cloud­Provider. She begins, “Though the ideas behind cl …

Social enterprise nonsense

The basic truth is perfectly articulated in Euan Semple’s excellent book title: “Organisations don’t tweet, people do.” There’s a lot of guff and business-speak fluffing up sales pitches and justifying product costs. At the end of the day you’re mostly better off using common sense.

Unless you’re a sociopath most of us know how to behave and if you add in our innate knowledge, a dash of intelligence and a smattering of imagination, hey presto.

Most of the social media tips and techniques published by the social enterprise vendors is self-justifying guff to give nervy managers the impression there is method in the social madness. It uses reassuring language and methodical techniques while selling metrics, measurement and accountability tools. The buck can passed and responsibility apportioned with the click of a stats report. Old management training is resold as the shiny, new social.

If there is anything to teach about social enterprise it’s the oldest lesson in the business book. Look after your customers.

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.” - Antoine de Saint-Exupery

davemorin:

Re-Reengineering the Corporation - The New York Times
Le vide [emptiness; structural holes] has a huge function in organizations.. […] Shock comes when different things meet. It’s the interface that’s interesting. […] If you don’t leave le vide, you have no unexpected things, no creation. There are two types of management. You can try to design for everything, or you can leave le vide and say, ‘I don’t know either; what do you think?’

René Fourtou

A predisposition toward leaving room for chance, building organizations to have structutral holes so that the unexpected can happen, a place where there are not always ready-made answers shared by everyone, an acceptance of the heterogeneous and unorthodox, and no official future.

I might paraphrase around Fourtou’s French, and say, 

There are two kinds of management. You can try to design for everything, or you can leave room for surprise. Room enough to say, ‘I don’t know either; what do you think?’

(via stoweboyd)

Shouldn’t every business’ goal be to make people feel good?