This is the October 2010 issue of our free monthly newsletter, Future of Work Agenda. We welcome comments on any of these articles. You can also access the newsletter directly on our website, at this link.
It’s often said that it’s darkest before dawn. But we like to pay more attention to the “early light” that always precedes sunrises. [continue reading...]
As you may know, the White House recently hosted a summit on flexible work. Thanks to Twitter I just found an online video conversation about flexible work. Click on the link below to watch a 7-minute video of Tory Johnson of ABC News interviewing Wharton Professor Stuart Friedman.
It’s well worth the seven minutes:
http://abcnews.go.com/Business/video/flex-time-white-house-10314120 [continue reading...]
This is the January 2010 issue of our free monthly newsletter, Future of Work Agenda. We welcome comments on any of these articles. You can also access the newsletter directly on our website, at this link.
Welcome to 2010. We are dispensing with our usual list of predictions for the coming year, as we’ve done in years past. As we suggest below, 2010 is going to be a year of massive change for just about every sector of the economy and every business. [continue reading...]
I was very pleased to read C.K. Prahalad’s back-page commentary in the September 21 issue of Business Week (“In Volatile Times, Agility Rules“).
The message is a basic one: when the future is uncertain, you’ve got to be able to shift both your strategy and your operations in a nanosecond.
[continue reading...]. . . Terrorism and pandemics pose threats of major disruptions.
I just retweeted a link to an incredibly powerful YouTube video, and then realized the video deserves even more exposure.
This is a very powerful message about how social media (of all kinds) is changing the nature of branding – but I actually believe it’s more important than that – it’s changing the future of work in very profound (and poorly understood) ways. [continue reading...]
We’re thrilled that one of our Future of Work Agenda feature articles (“Someone Hit the Reset Button“) has been picked up and reprinted by Capital Magazine, the premier business publication in Dubai, United Arab Emirates.
It’s an English-language magazine that we believe is comparable to Forbes or Fortune Magazine.
Free registration is required to access the online version in Capital Magazine, but once you’ve done that you can read the article here:
Enjoy! [continue reading...]
I seem to be inundated these days with articles and blog posts about the differences between “being there” and interacting with people remotely.
Just yesterday I blogged about the story in last Sunday’s New York Times about the continuing importance of face-to-face interaction (“Place Still Matters – A Lot“).
And now I want to refer you to a recent article in Impact Magazine (a publication produced by OM Workspace, the contract furniture division of OfficeMax).
The article (“Face to Face: Design and Technology for Collaboration“), by Elizabeth Hockerman, explores an important but all-too-often unasked question:
Mobile technology provides untethered freedom. So why do millions of people still partake in the dreaded rush-hour commute to work?
The answer, of course, is that they want to be with other people – and there’s still an almost-universal gut sense that face-to-face communication is still more powerful than “virtual” meetings, even with the increasingly powerful collaboration tools now available (there’s also the harsh reality that lots of those people would work remotely if their employers would let them, but that’s another story altogether).
Ms. Hockerman quoted one “expert” on the subject:
“The main reason people go to the corporate office is to be with other people,” says James Ware, executive producer of The Work Design Collaborative LLC, based in Prescott, Ariz. “There is a tremendous power in face-to-face meetings. Same-time, same-place can spark a powerful source of collaborative innovation and meaning for people.”
We’ve just posted the online version of Future of Work Agenda for the month of June.
We will be emailing the newsletter to all subscribers later this evening (it’s free – you can register online here), and posting a complete version here on the blog as well. [continue reading...]
Congratulations to Diane Coles and her colleagues at SCAN Health Plan in Long Beach, California.
SCAN has just won the IFMA Orange County Award for Excellence in recognition of the innovative AWESOME project that Diane formulated and led over the past three years. The award was announced last night, June 5, at the annual Awards Banquet.
It is well-deserved. Through Diane’s leadership SCAN has moved a couple of hundred non-exempt workers into a flexible work environment, increased the density of occupation at corporate headquarters by 22%, increased participant productivity by 18%, and cut office provisioning costs by 38%. It’s a truly remarkable achievement.
We were privileged to support Diane’s work and have recently written and spoken about her story at both IFMA and Corenet events. I posted a summary of the story here a couple of months ago (“Getting Real: Transforming the Workplace at SCAN Health“) that includes an embedded powerpoint presentation the three of us delivered in early April at the IFMA Industries Forum meeting in Vancouver, BC.
Six years I published a short thought piece called “Is email the Killer App – or the App to Kill?).
I suggested there that:
. . . for all its ease of use and low cost, email is clearly a good news/bad news phenomenon. In many respects email creates as many problems as it solves, and it may just be the wrong model for the kind of distributed but collaborative work (and life) that most of us lead today.
[snip]
The more fundamental challenge is that email really works best as a one-time point-to-point communication medium (both one-to-one and one-to-many), while most of our communications (of all kinds) are actually events with a larger stream: part of an ongoing dialogue with one or more individuals.
I was reminded of those perspectives several times over the past week as I read about Google’s announcement of the new Wave platform – and then watched the demo from the I/O conference (caution: the full video lasts over 120 minutes, but you can get the essence of the concept, including a very impressive demo of Wave in action, in about 15 minutes).