Harnessing the Gig Economy

My Caribbean-based correspondent Nicole Antonio-Gadson (it's always important to have friends in hot places) drew my attention to an article from the CIPD this week that asked the question Is your talent strategy ready for the Gig Economy. As fellow free-range professionals it's a subject that we both have an interest in from personal professional and client professional perspectives … Continue reading Harnessing the Gig Economy

Talking about innovation

Yesterday I had the great privilege to be able to speak about the concept of innovation with the board of a major multinational company. Having spent the past few months exploring themes of collaboration with many different organisations about collaboration as part of my #sharingorg project, I've picked up many stories about how innovative things are happening … Continue reading Talking about innovation

Agile procurement

With news coming through of the Government's Spending Review this week, one particular piece caught my eye and got me thinking... Now maybe I'm reading this incorrectly, but that to me reads as a £1.3bn project to deliver a set of defined outputs by next year. Call me a cynic, but if that is the … Continue reading Agile procurement

Best Practice versus Good Ideas

Over the years I've always railed against the concept of "best" practice. It annoys me probably mainly because I'm a bit of an iconoclast. But less emotionally the concept jars for two reasons: first of all because "best" practice is something that a team achieves through learning, rather than something that can be simply adopted, and trying … Continue reading Best Practice versus Good Ideas

Sub-culture

One of the things I find myself saying a great deal at the moment is "I don't think you mean culture, I think you mean behaviour." Like a pedantic stuck record, the phrase usually comes about when people are talking about trying to get people to behave differently in organisations, and then describe that as … Continue reading Sub-culture

The time and place

Organizations have a natural tendency to think of IT systems as repositories or as machines. Places for things to be stored or for processes to be executed. But when it comes to collaboration platforms, we might be better to think of them as places. As  Danah Boyd’s “It’s Complicated” describes of social networks being like the … Continue reading The time and place

A Tinder for business

There is, quite frankly, an awful lot of guff talked about social networks. Top of the list of guff for me at the moment is "An enterprise social network will make people connect with lots of new people." Why do I see this as marketing flatulence? Well, because it just doesn't map to the ways … Continue reading A Tinder for business

Curiouser and curiouser

I had the pleasure of spending yesterday at the Leading Edge Forum event in London, listening to some of my research peers, leading figures from the world of technology, and others, about the need for organisations to build up new capabilities to cope with both "Big D" ("Uber-esque") and "Little d" (self, from within) disruption. … Continue reading Curiouser and curiouser

The last of the PA generation

What follows is pure conjecture, based on a bit of guesswork and some circumstantial evidence, but here goes... Within the #sharingorg research a common theme emerging is the necessity for senior leadership to both support and live the values of any organisation-wide collaboration initiative. It's also clear that there is a level of technological disassociation amongst … Continue reading The last of the PA generation