Imagine for a minute, if you will, a Dad entering the en suite bathroom to find his girls in the bath. Nothing out of the ordinary if your girls are 9 and 5. But imagine if your girls have propped up an iPad on the counter and are listening to jazz. When you ask, "why are you listening to jazz" and the response is, "Dad, it’s relaxing, calming and like a spa" … do you: Smile, like a proud father? Wonder if their mother has actually taken them to a spa before? Beam because they’ve brought an iPad into the bathroom to play jazz music? Back away slowly hoping you’re not in the wrong house? Fully expect an asteroid to hit you because your good fortune is up? Related Posts:The Recalibration of PlayFriday Fun: iPrefer iPad iScrabbleFriday Fun: The Difference b/t Apple & Microsoft Is …16 Months of Social Learning Platform Insanity: A RecapThe Hare, the Tortoise and the Jackass of Social HR

Sure, we've seen a couple trailers already for Guy Ritchie's new film, but we haven't yet seen one that's five minutes long. It's here now! The post Man From U.N.C.L.E. Brings You The Sexiest Spies appeared first on WIRED.

They are the weak, the bullies, the ruthless They become and personify the finger that points at a scapegoat, gleefully abdicating any responsibility for erroneous outcomes or missed targets. They ascend to positions of power through matador like precision. Their sword is not metal, rather a behavioural style that aims to demean, command or enforce. Collectively there are hundreds of thousands of them occupying roles in organizations across all sectors and geographies. They too are implicated in the woeful levels of employee disengagement. This cohort should be renamed the Mysterium Tremendum Leader; a leader, I propose, that uses their positional power to invoke fear and trembling in its team members. A leader who looks up to Weber, Fayol and Taylor as the triad of perfected management definition. These leaders have no place in the organization of 2012 and beyond. These Mysterium Tremendum leaders, if they are unwilling to reflect on how destructive their leadership style is and who are unable to shift to the TEAM model or the Collaboration Cycle or new Leadership Tenets must be weeded out and replaced. They are not the leaders of today or tomorrow that organizations need in order to build a connected, collaborative and engaged workforce. Related Posts:Future of Work: Add Open Leadership, Enterprise 2.0, Connected Learning and MixNew Leadership Model: An Exercise in BifurcationThe Link Between Leadership, Learning & Organizational PerformanceSideways Leadership of Social MediaGive Piece a Chance

… clocks. It’s a tad important to know the time. Well … unless of course you believe being punctual is poisonous, but that’s a post for another day. If you own an iOS device like an iPad and you travel, like me, you may not have noticed that when you step off the plane in a different timezone, malnourished and groggy, the second you connect yourself to wifi … presto, your iPad’s clock is updated. (sorry gals, not your biological one) When I plug in my (somewhat) archaic Dell laptop powered by Windows 7 and connect to overpriced hotel wifi, my laptop still thinks I’m in the land of Pacific orca whales. One small point which I’m sure will be mitigated in Windows 8. Right? Right??? Related Posts:Friday Fun: iPrefer iPad iScrabbleFriday Fun: All That JazzBosses Should Shift From Scroll to SwipeThe Recalibration of PlayShouldn’t We Just Best Buy Corporate Learning

EA's anticipated shooter from the studio behind the Battlefield franchise was at Nerd HQ, which means so were we. The post Video: Hands-On With Star Wars: Battlefront at Comic Con appeared first on WIRED.

A truly collaborative organization will become a productive force to behold when contribution, in its many different forms, becomes the de facto behaviour of everyone. Give Piece a Chance. To be more specific, give a piece of content, a piece of feedback, a piece of knowledge, a piece of your experience a chance. You have wisdom. You have intellect. You have opinion. You should give that piece of whatever the chance to help others (and the organization) with various goals and objectives, be it individual, team or enterprise-wide. Let others know that your piece might help build an ecosystem of improvement in the organization. In return, encourage others to do the same. You never know what may happen. (remember about reciprocity and interlocutors) Marcel Proust once claimed, "The real act of discovery consists not in finding new lands but in seeing with new eyes." It is with the new eyes of being a contributor, of giving piece a chance where I believe we will build organizations capable of addressing the chronic disengagement levels, lack of innovation and levels of productivity. Over at HBR, Scott Keller and Carolyn Dewar wrote a wonderful case study involving ANZ Bank in a post entitled, "Three Steps to a High-Performance Culture" on January 26th, 2012. One key paragraph stood out for me: ANZ Bank offers an example: a decade ago, the bank embarked on an effort described as a "unique plan of eschewing traditional growth strategies and recasting the culture of the bank to lift efficiency and earnings." In the initial two years, the share of employees having the sense that ANZ "lived its values" went from 20 to 80 percent, and the share seeing "productivity in meetings" from 61 to 91 percent, with similar rises in the shares seeing "openness and honesty" and a "can-do culture." In parallel, revenue per employee increased 89 percent and the bank overtook its peers in total returns to shareholders and customer satisfaction. A full ten years after those initial efforts, ANZ has sustained its results: its profit after tax has grown at a cumulative average growth rate of 15 percent, putting it well ahead of its industry. It’s a great example of how an organization, in this case an otherwise historically organized hierarchical bank, employed the ‘give piece a chance’ motto to great and sustained success. ANZ might once have been a culture that was closed and disengaged. It might never have given piece a chance. But, through some organizational re-engineering and focusing on a concept like ‘give piece a chance‘, amongst other collaborative and engagement inducing actions, it demonstrated bottom line business results. All we are saying, is give piece a chance. Related Posts:Virtual Worlds in an Organization are not a Time Waster (and other beefs)Case Study: Tim Hockey, a Collaborative & Transparent CEOThe ‘Empire Avenue’ Strikes BackThe Link Between Leadership, Learning & Organizational Performance5 Use Cases for Badges in the Enterprise

Fresh off the Warner Bros. panel this morning, here's Zack Snyder's latest and (hopefully) greatest. The post The New Dawn of Justice Trailer is a Big Step in the Right Direction appeared first on WIRED.

My, how times have changed. Two years ago, people were scoffing at the term social learning. Three years ago, social learning was solely for the nerds like me, whereas four years ago it was a term used solely in academic circles. But during the past year and a half or so, social learning has become cotton candy at the fair. Everybody wants some. In particular, there has been a fair amount of shuffling, repositioning, flanking and acquiring going on in the vendor space as it relates to our fluffy, sugary snack known as social learning. Let’s take a stroll down memory lane to recap and provide some analysis on a few of the notable moves. SuccessFactors (SF) buys Jambok, SAP buys SuccessFactors If the SF move to buy Jambok didn’t start the "what’s my strategy" drumbeat in early 2011, the SAP move to buy SF was a full-on drum roll in late 2011. It’s no secret the SAP LMS system needs a fair bit of TLC and I fully expect the SF product stack to find its way into a new and improved SAP LMS, although I suspect it will become more of a true social collaboration platform (on the cloud) for SAP customers. SAP has other opportunities to beef up its social learning story including, but not limited to, Streamwork. Taleo buys Learn.com, Oracle buys Taleo Learn.com was a big boost to the product stack of Taleo by way of the Taleo acquisition move in late 2010, but that boost didn’t last long because just more than a year later, Oracle took a look at its horrendous LMS, talent management and social learning story and bought Taleo in February 2012. Some may argue it’s a defensive play against SAP; that may be true, but I suspect it has more to do with Salesforce and wanting to get properly aligned to the budding cloud strategy on all things talent and human capital. Yes, I believe Rypple was but one acquisition by Salesforce and I fully expect them to take a run at other social learning entities by the end of 2012. SkillSoft re-releases SkillPort with inGenius One of the dark horse social learning platforms out there is SkillSoft and its SkillPort cloud-based LMS. The latest enhancements come in the form of inGenius, a social feature previously found only within its Books 24×7 service. inGenius, as it should, permits users to rank, comment, follow, search and generally interact in the social sphere of usage. Cloud-based LMS with social features? Hello Salesforce? Saba, the "people cloud" company, upgrades and acquires Not to be outdone in the acquisition frenzy, Saba CEO Bobby Yazdani recently purchased HumanConcepts, an organizational modeling and visualization company. You’re asking yourself, "what does this have to do with social learning" right about now, but my bet is that Saba’s social learning story will be improved by the visualization component immensely. Imagine the semantic layer of social learning for a second displayed with out-of-this-world (and collaborative) visuals … all on its new People Cloud? Scrumptious cotton candy indeed. (Oh, and hello Salesforce?) And what is going on at Blackboard and Desire2Learn? First, Blackboard not only begins acquiring companies like Moodlerooms and NetSpot to keep its feet firmly planted in the academic vertical, but it also doubles down on the corporate sector by a) improving its social learning feature set and b) partnering with … you got it, Salesforce to launch Blackboard Learn - an integrated Blackboard social LMS experience into the Salesforce experience. Not to be outdone, Desire2Learn not only completely updated its platform to become a true social learning engine (including integration with Twitter, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn), but it also recently hired Dennis Kavelman as COO to complement visionary CEO John Baker. This Canadian outfit is one to watch in the social learning space. There are others I’m watching as well, but I’ll save those thoughts for another trip to the cotton candy counter. Related Posts:HR Doesn’t Need a Seat at the Table, it is the TableThe Hare, the Tortoise and the Jackass of Social HRThe edX, Udacity and Coursera ShowdownSo The LMS Is Dead: Collaboration-Talent Convergence is NextFriday Fun: All That Jazz

Zack Snyder, director of Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice, has moved Gotham City. Is nothing sacred anymore? The post Zack Snyder Turned Gotham City and Metropolis Into the Bay Area appeared first on WIRED.

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