Take the work out of work

“We need to create work environments that are as immersive and involving as the best video games.”

Human beings are most productive when work feels like play. Enthusiasm, imagination and resourcefulness—the critical ingredients for success in the creative economy—get unleashed when people are having fun. In the future, the most successful organizations will be the ones that have figured out how to blur the boundary between vocation and avocation. Among other things, this will require organizations to better align personal interests and professional responsibilities, to take the drudgery out of work, and to grant employees more control over what they work on.

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How to start a movement in your company - Part 3 - Unstoppable

Editor's Note: This is Part Three of a three-part story. Click here for Part One and Part Two. It was back in July 2010. I was planning a large meeting to brief sales leadership on what was... Read more

Story by David Choe on February 21, 2011 36 Comments

The Tube: IDEO Builds a Collaboration System That Inspires through Passion

To be successful and truly collaborative, knowledge-sharing systems require intuitive tools that connect people, reward participation, and align well with existing work and communication patterns.... Read more

Story by Doug Solomon on April 6, 2011 27 Comments

How to start a movement in your company, Part 2 - accelerating momentum

Editor's Note: This is Part Two of a three-part story. Click here for Part One and Part Three. Just as the team was high-fiving each other from successfully implementing a massively difficult project... Read more

Story by David Choe on December 16, 2010 3 Comments

How do you get 13 ant-farms and a beehive to work together by using only 4 words ?

Facing the challenges of our comapny (mounting pressure, weak & uninterested governance, lack of centralization) our team realized that no singular solution could tackle the problem in its full... Read more

Story by Bence Horvath on July 18, 2011 2 Comments

Tapping Employee Enthusiasm for Facebook to Encourage Innovation

Most businesses do a poor job of encouraging daily innovation from employees. This stalls the organisation's growth and leaves employers searching for that missing X factor that could help employees... Read more

Hack by Noorulla & Soni Rachel Oommen on March 25, 2011 2 Comments

Being a true learning company and being free of management: living the dream

Update to our semi-final entry (a kind of preface) This update summarises our story and focuses on two key principles that shape our work. We also give illustrations of how other organisations we... Read more

Story by Andres Roberts on February 25, 2011 3 Comments

"Innovation Project" is an oxymoron: how a coached social network experiment put the "us" back in stimulus

Innovation should be the most enjoyable form of work, but the project modality leaches all joy from it: deadline pressure, boss-driven scope, and a team made up of "the usual suspects". Innovation... Read more

Story by Jeremy Clark on June 20, 2010 7 Comments

Getting Rid of the Busy Work so You Can Get to Work

*In order for organizations to thrive in the 21st century global economy, knowledge workers must be allowed the flexibility and discretionary authority to offload their non-core busy work to help... Read more

Story by Jordan Cohen on July 5, 2011 32 Comments

Organizational Trust 2.0: 42projects

42projects is an initiative across several teams at Microsoft to innovate in the way we manage by focusing on building trust, using games to increase productivity, and encouraging grassroots... Read more

Story by Ross Smith on April 11, 2010 4 Comments

Tongal: A 21st century business model for finding top talent and putting them to work on something they love

Tongal circumvents the traditional Madison Avenue system, by using the internet to bring together talent around the world, and the organizations who need them to create winning advertising. Tongal... Read more

Story by James DeJulio on October 18, 2010 7 Comments

"Soft" R&D: You don't have to be a geeky engineer to experience the thrill of inventing

TANDBERG breaks the engineers' monopoly on inventing by bringing its leaders, sales people, channel managers and sales engineers into "soft R&D labs." Their inventions are new "moves" that... Read more

Story by Erika Ilves on December 9, 2010 5 Comments

Retire-a-Little: Enabling More Fulfilled Working Lives

Retire-a-Little is a program that gives employees the chance to buy back one day a week so they can spend that time on other activities that are important to them. The notion stems from the... Read more

Hack by Ricardo Semler on February 1, 2012 1 Comments