Work in the network era needs to be both cooperative and collaborative, meaning that organizations have to support both types of activities. This may not be an easy transition for companies based almost uniquely on command and control leadership. But in this emerging network era, cooperative innovation trumps collaborative innovation, writes Stowe Boyd.

My experience is that communities of practice can help make the transition from hierarchies to networks, or as Jon Husband describes the resulting structure; wirearchy. Communities of practice, both internal and external; can be safe places between highly focused work and potentially chaotic social networking. The Community Roundtable has a Community Maturity Model that describes this transition, in four stages. The model makes it relatively easy to see where your organization stands and where it should go. Read more →

HBR: How Poor Leaders Become Good Leaders

• They improved their communication effectiveness.
• They made an effort to share their knowledge and expertise more widely. 
• They developed a broader perspective.
• They began to encourage cooperation rather than competition.

These four skills, of the nine identified by Jack Zenger and Joseph Folkman, are some of the core skills for connected leaders. Leadership, like culture, is an emergent property of people working together. For example, trust only emerges if knowledge is shared and diverse points of view are accepted. As networked, distributed workplaces become the norm, trust will emerge from environments that are open, transparent and diverse. As a result of improved trust, leadership will be seen for what it is; an emergent property of a network in balance and not some special property available to only the select few. This is connected leadership, or leadership that understands networks.

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Ross Dawson says that people who have “learnt how to learn” will be better prepared for jobs of the future. “We’re finding people who have learnt how to learn know how to engage with a community and tap into others for support.” This is what personal knowledge management is all about. It starts by seeking people and knowledge sources and the Seek-Sense-Share cycle finishes by sharing with communities and social networks. My recent workshops, both online and in person, indicate a need for PKM skills in all types of organizations and for people at all levels, from freelancers, researchers, managers, executives and more. The benefits are not just for individuals, preparing for their next job, but the organization gains from employees who take control of their learning and freely share their knowledge. PKM makes for more resilient individuals and companies. Read more →

My colleague, Clark Quinn, in Building a Performance Ecosystem states that the benefits of maximum information for people to get work done, combined with minium barriers to achieve their work goals, are good for the entire organization. “When they [workers] can get the resources they need and the right people to assist when necessary, the performance benefits are obvious.“ Alignment is necessary. Read more →

Are you talent or labour? The difference may be very important. According to a recent article in the New York Times, talent is getting into a position to be able to push capitalism around, but not labour.

Talent is extracting more of the pie and getting richer. The gulf grows between talent — the high-earning, differentiated workers — and labor, those widget makers who support them. Read more →

In the FastCoDesign article, How do you create a culture of innovation? the authors note four skills that most successful innovators exhibit:

• Questioning: Asking probing questions that impose or remove constraints. Example: What if we were legally prohibited from selling to our current customer?
• Networking: Interacting with people from different backgrounds who provide access to new ways of thinking.
• Observing: Watching the world around them for surprising stimuli.
• Experimenting: Consciously complicating their lives by trying new things or going to new places. Read more →

I have been reviewing a number of resources I have collected on social media, social learning and return on investment. The bottom line seems very clear to me. Social technologies remove artificial organizational boundaries and let knowledge be shared more easily. I create slide presentations so that I have something ready in case I need to quickly review a subject, such as an impromptu client brief. I put this one together as an aid that might be helpful in presenting a few aspects of the positive impact of social technologies in the workplace.

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We will create the future organization by bringing democracy to the workplace, I wrote last week in How we will manage. The essential factors, in my opinion, for an effective networked workplace (Enterprise 2.0, Social Business, etc.) are not what we have seen in many industrial style companies:

1. Shared power: necessary in a networked economy.
2. Autonomy: essential for an engaged workforce.
3. Finally, the social contract for work needs to change. Read more →

We are starting the online PKM Workshop this week, with a free webinar on 5 September.

Here are some questions that personal knowledge management can address:

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Here are some of the observations and insights that were shared via Twitter this past week.

@GeorgeMonbiot: “The “self-made man” fallacy is essentially psychopathic: denies the role of and need for other people.”

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