The experience of growing up online will profoundly shape the workplace expectations of “Generation F” – the Facebook Generation. At a minimum, they’ll expect the social environment of work to reflect the social context of the Web, rather than as is currently the case, a mid-20th-century Weberian...
As you're putting together the guest list for your holiday parties you might want to consider this: not once, but twice over the last five years I've embarked on an in-depth review of the academic and practical literature on leadership. The first time was for a 2006 book with Jeff Pfeffer, Hard...
When you ask children what they want to be when they are older, how many of them say they want to be a manager? I've certainly never met one who had such aspirations. In part this is because management is a pretty amorphous concept to a ten-year-old. But it's also because we adults aren't exactly...
Editor's note: Research by McKinsey & Company's Organization Practice finds that better collaborative capabilities help companies achieve superior financial performance. These results are supported by academic research, which shows that the ability to collaborate in networks is more important...
Most of the time you take your office computers for granted. OK, there’s a niggle or two, but generally the IT folks can sort it out. Occasionally, though, it gets more serious. When the system crashes regularly or a virus hijacks the network there’s no easy alternative: you need to upgrade the...
If you were compiling a list of the world's most innovative companies, which businesses would top your list? No one would be surprised if you picked Google, Apple or Amazon, but what about Wal-Mart? (Huh?) Or PG&E (a utility, for crying out loud)? Surely there must be some mistake! Or how 'bout...
Take the Tweet a Hack challenge: Help us "Take the Work out of Work" and win a $100 Amazon gift certificate! Is your work as engaging, inspiring, and fulfilling as it could be? Do you (and the people you know) get enough meaning, freedom, energizing challenge, and fun from your job? Does your...
The term “strategic planning” conjures up images of suits in conference rooms diagramming the path to world domination on whiteboards. All too often, strategic planning is an activity reserved for the organizational elite—executives aided by consultants. The top dogs think up all the big ideas—and...
Editor’s note: Why are managers so often short sighted at the expense of the long-term health and value of their companies? One reason is that compensation and incentive systems are too often geared to the short term. These incentives can skew our perspective of the bigger picture. Indeed, research...
Most change programs fail, but the odds of success can be greatly improved by taking into account these counterintuitive insights about how employees interpret their environment and choose to act. In 1996, John Kotter published Leading Change . Considered by many to be the seminal work in the field...
