And there’s a lot of connections indeed, just think about this line: “Create the space for people to make things happen.” Sharing knowledge in corporate creation spaces. Liberating office humans. Social business design.

… doesn’t work when dealing with creative, hard to pre-plan types of work. Knowledge work, yes. Much better to equip people with autonomy, mastery and a sense of purpose.

And that’s putting up some interesting questions with regard to leadership styles (command and control is doomed …), the organization and improving of collaborative work (facilitating connections and conversations through social software in the enterprise comes to mind … well, yes this needs some serious multi-pillar implementation efforts to succeed) and overall how a (shared) sense of purpose can be entertained be agreed upon be managed for? And is it a deformation professionelle that I am seeing an important place for social software and sustainable Enterprise 2.0 endeavours in this sense-making space too?

Wer sagt denn dass man Kröten schlucken muss um ein Silver Surfer zu werden?

Yes, together, we work smarter. Smarter being all things agile, flexible, you know, see here and there …

via Stefan

Some of my notes:
- subject matter experts for business applications are not developers
- opportunities for collaboration: building communities (where none exist)
- the job of the Collaborative Software Initiative is to assess and build core teams, balancing requirements and benefits – i.e. they act as a network facilitator providing training and coaching
- main job is acting as central node and connector, i.e. supporting inter-company collaboration for open source (and soon commodity software)
- collaboration in this space makes a lot of sense from a strategy perspective, Stuart talked about reasons in three arenas – technology, social networking and “organizational dynamics”

There was a lot of content in Stuarts talk, and very dense charts, will link to them as soon as they get published.

[...] minimal impact KM touts the benefits of doing a great deal without in any way affecting the work lives of your colleagues or the results of your enterprise [...]

Dr. Vaine identifies several proven methods of achieving minimal impact KM:

- depreciative inquiry
- social network paralysis
- corporate flogging
- six stigma

Great stuff, but if you’re really interested in catching up on KM World 2008 better check out Michael Sampsons conference notes. Interesting in many regards, especially for an (enterprise) social software consultant who sees Knowledge Management as one of the most interesting usage arenas.

The Human Element:

Innovation begins and ends with people, individuals who have the courage to push the boundaries. It also requires a corporate culture that nurtures and rewards creative thinking, where people feel comfortable enough to voice new ideas, no matter how small. That is where successful leadership comes in. A skilled and innovative leader must be a fearless visionary committed to backing bold ideas.

Innovate or Die:

Mel Kamarzin, CEO of Sirius Radio believes “there is no punishment that goes for taking a chance, making a decision”. Yet too often firms don’t take the steps really required to innovate because they want to protect their existing offerings. They seal their fate by doing just enough to get by. Fear of changing the status quo can be paralysing but if you are not moving forward and innovating in today’s challenging economic environment, it’s worse than standing still. You’re effectively moving backwards.

And the third installment – Redefining Innovation:

Innovation can be a hard concept to pin down. That’s why defining what it means to an organisation is the first step towards truly engaging customers. Radical thinking needs to be employed to come up with the blue-sky ideas. To turn those ideas into revenue generators means making a creative leap beyond the nuts and bolts of a product and really connecting with consumers. Ursula Burns, Chief Executive of Xerox says, “Customers can’t really articulate always what they want. They give you a rough outline”.

Yet indifference, hostility, and isolation are common obstacles in organizations that are inhibiting the growth in innovation (by Irving Wladawsky-Berger) – especially collaborative innovation. Yes, orchestrating groups of heterogenous knowledge workers is hard, that’s why there are Enterprise Collaboration Consultants with an innovation management background (hint …).

What else? Jay Cross offers us another chapter of Informal Learning: Rediscovering the Natural Pathways That Inspire Innovation and Performance: Chapter 4 on Emergence:

Emergence is the key characteristic of complex systems. It is the process by which simple entities self-organize to form something more complex. As training converges with bottom-up self-organizing systems, network effects, and the empowerment of individuals, it morphs into emergent learning.

More on Jay’s book here.

Via Jon Husband I also learned of Niall Cook‘s new book (“Enterprise 2.0 – How Social Software Will Change The Future of Work”), you may download the introduction and the first chapter.:

Will add this to my pile of “books to read” for my consulting business … after I’ve read all of Chris Brogan’s lifehacks for more efficient, effective blogging.

Speaking of productivity, yes, I know – didn’t blog much about and after reboot, but last week was just plain packed – both work and private life (e.g. bought a new car, photos will follow suite when I finally can lay my hands on it).

Was ist eine ausgereifte technische Lösung? Anstatt jedes aufregend blinkende Klötzchen in die Hand zu nehmen und zu schauen, was man daraus noch alles bauen könnte, könnten sich Infrastrukturplaner und Technikentwickler ja auch überlegen, mit welchen Klötzchen sich ein bestimmtes Problem am elegantesten lösen lässt. Aus abgefahrenen Gelenkbausteinen allein konnte man schon beim Lego nie ein vernünftiges Haus, Auto oder Schiff bauen – aus den “langweiligen” Grundbausteinen schon. Warum sollte das im echten Leben anders sein?

Gilt auch für Wikis und deren Potenzial für emergente Entwicklungen, und ja, mir gefällt das Bild der “schlichten Eleganz”.

[...] a draft for a simple business model innovation manual [...] the manual will help business people describe their business model step by step, assess its strengths and weaknesses in order to then improve it.

Explaining, coaching and teaching clients on business model innovation isn’t easy, most of the time building up a shared understanding of the space takes long. So for business development work this little manual comes in very handy, even when the models I tend to use differ in parts. While Alexander starts with customers (an approach I understand and like) I lean towards starting off with organizational competencies and capabilities, i.e. the organizational context (especially with my day job doing enterprise social software consulting).