I am not intermittent nor ephemeral for I travel on ubiquitous source. ‘Hope springs eternal’ you say? Aye, this rivulet does meander with hope but ’tis crowded by dangling bystanders. Low hanging fruit, I say, but there they remain perched and private. Why so rigid Oak? Don’t you perennially flower? Is it my canoe that frightens your existence? You need not be fearful for we are aided by the youthful, the old, the mature and the rejuvenated. Was it Marc who scared you off? Don’t fret Oak, be strong like you are. Simply soften your stance. This water ought to breathe life into the stoic giants who oversee hierarchy. Oh Sequoia! You loom large. I paddle by yet your cones, so keen, remain shackled. Size matters not. Magnitude is measured by empowerment, by empathy. Ornamental sure, but your impact is not beatific. Your new ‘husband’ should be wirerarchy. I am upriver, seeking the source. Buoyed by Archimedes I scan for riverbank hebetude. Why so dull and lethargic Pine and Birch? Your boredom spills over for all to see. You consume the source for you presume its omnipresence will be in perpetuity. Daft! Lurking over this stream is but one half of your purpose. Please read ‘The Giving Tree’. Oh Arbutus, in the shadow of organizational arbores, it is you who unconditionally gives back. The Salish, perhaps the true captains of the canoe, were mesmerized by your demeanor. Without hesitation, without question. You are the provider of medicine, open-minded & tolerant. Teach those along this tributary to act as you do; selfless, reciprocal, symbiotic. My canoe, it strengthens. Whispers of community lie downstream. For the flow of this brook is invisible and it undulates, but it gains speed. And you, aside from Arbutus, what shall you do? Will you encourage my canoe to collaborate, to create, to cultivate? Spirit of Haida Gwaii; The Jade Canoe by Bill Reid. Photo: Bill McLennan Related Posts:Friday Fun: You Don’t Have an Office?Friday Fun: Get Back to WorkDan’s Personal 2012 GoalsWhy I Love NewsleVancouver is Home to Several ‘Social’ Rock Stars

Joss Whedon announced at Comic-Con International today what his next project will be: a new comic called 'Twist.' The post Joss Whedon Is Making a ‘Victorian Female Batman’ Comic appeared first on WIRED.

Mark Fidelman recently published a piece on Forbes entitled, "Microsoft’s View of the Future Workplace is Brilliant, Here’s Why". I’m not sure if Mark wrote the title or whether Forbes editors were in charge, but it really doesn’t do the post justice. The second half of the piece is where the true brilliance is … if you’re someone like me who is passionate, fascinated and somewhat dogged about the future of work, and how it is made up of open leadership, enterprise 2.0 and connected learning. Mark states: I can say with confidence that the workplace has to change dramatically in order to remain effective. From there, he outlines 10 key reasons why. You should have a read, it really is good stuff. From my vantage point, (and what my book is trying to depict) our organizations are built on 19th century learning styles coupled by 20th century leadership models fused with 21st century technologies. "She ain’t pretty she just looks that way." (thank you Northern Pikes) Leaders remain trapped; their default modes of executing first before engaging with others is becoming ridiculous. Couple this leadership style with the adage learning only occurs in a classroom or eLearning course. (sidebar - why does the C-Suite continue to accept ‘number of people who took a course’ as a viable metric?) The technology that is creeping if not storming into the organization (thank you Enterprise 2.0) should be causing leaders to rethink their 19th and 20th century models of learning and leadership. No, technology can’t solely fix behavioural problems which is precisely why you cannot change an organization’s culture unless (in parallel) you try to enhance or improve all three tenets: learning, leadership and technology. One of Mark’s best paragraphs is as follows: The new role of management is to facilitate the finding of solutions; not to dictate them. The new role of management is to facilitate "connections", to match people with the right skills and abilities to projects where those skills are most needed. The new role of management is to remove hurdles to engagement by building approvals mechanisms into workflows. This, in my opinion, is the combination of a brave new org where holistic models of learning, leadership and technology coalesce to create the wishful panacea palace called ‘future of work‘. I just hope it doesn’t take another century. I hope we’re ‘ahead by a century‘. Related Posts:Linking Company Growth to Enterprise 2.0 & Learning 2.0Hierarchy starts with a ‘Higher Arc & Key’A Riddle, Wrapped in a Mystery, Inside an EnigmaThe Link Between Leadership, Learning & Organizational…The Mysterium Tremendum Leader

Series creator Ron Moore teased fans at the show's Comic-Con panel with new things to come in Season 2. The post Ron Moore Promises ‘A Whole New Outlander‘ Next Season appeared first on WIRED.

I’m a proud Canadian, but on Sunday, May 27th, 2012 my level of pride exponentially increased as a result of 31 year-old Ryder Hesjedal, a native of Victoria, British Columbia, who became the first Canadian ever to win one of the three heralded Grand Tour cycling races, the Giro d’Italia. It’s akin to India winning the Olympic Gold Medal in Ice Hockey. If you’re unfamiliar with cycling and specifically the Grand Tours, imagine being on your bicycle for three weeks, pedaling between Vancouver and Chicago (3,500 km), climbing up thousands of meters of mountains while moving at an average speed of 38 km/h. Insane, I know. Imagine being 6’2 and weighing only 159 lbs to boot. Outlandish, I know. Aside from my patriotism and passion for cycling itself, I’ve been reflecting on Ryder’s win from a leadership perspective. Proactive Leadership - in November of 2011, Ryder’s management team (Garmin-Barracuda) informed him that he was going to be the ‘team leader’ for the 2012 Giro d’Italia. (this means the team would be helping him win the race) Not only was it a boost of confidence, it was an act of proactive leadership that allowed Ryder (and the team) to begin mentally preparing for the 2012 Giro itself.   Open-Minded Leadership - when Ryder was in his early teens, he and his family agreed to work with Swiss-born immigrant Juerg Feldmann, whose specialty was fitness and lung capacity.  He wanted to help the young lad increase his VO2 max (a way to quantify capacity of oxygen during exercise) to help his athleticism. By the age of 16, Hesjedal’s lung capacity was 4.6 litres, two times the amount of ‘normal’ people. When competing in the Giro, Ryder’s lungs were able to take in almost four times the amount of air and oxygen that you and I can handle. That is being an open-minded leader even at an early age.   No ‘I’ In Team Leadership - although Ryder’s name goes down in history as the first Canadian to win a Grand Tour and the 2012 Giro d’Italia itself, you can’t win a cycling race, particularly the Grand Tours (Spain, France or Italy) unless you have a team that is committed, communicative, collaborative and selfless. The Garmin-Barracuda team epitomizes this notion that there is no ‘I’ in team. Throughout the three weeks of racing, Ryder continually heaped praise on his teammates: "I’ve been doing this for a long time but it still amazes me what we’re able to accomplish. And I’m going to savour this for a long time." (notice he used the word we’re) "We kept confident and said today is the day after missing out yesterday. The team was behind me 100% on the run in to the climb. Pete Stetina and Christian Vande Velde (Garmin Barracuda teammates) were never far from my side and Vande Velde put me in final position on the final approach. I just had to go for it and it went perfectly. This pink jersey is a product of good strong team work." (notice the use of team throughout his statement) "The team was incredible, every guy rode incredible, I am honoured by their effort and all we did here. Thank you to my team, my directors, the whole staff and all of our amazing sponsors, and my beautiful family and friends." (notice the humility) There is a lesson in Ryder’s Giro win for all of us. It may take brawn but it also takes a leadership brain to accomplish any goal. Chapeau Ryder. And yes, below are our young goats dressed in Pink holding 31 pink carnations and daisies hours after his win. Related Posts:The Mysterium Tremendum LeaderWhose Your Brian Reid?The Link Between Leadership, Learning & Organizational…5 Ways to Become Less Collaborative at WorkInterlocutors of 2012 (the goats are better for it)

Robert Kazinsky—the actor who plays Orgrim in 'Warcraft'—told the Comic-Con crowd his love of the game it's based on once caused a girlfriend to leave him. The post Orgrim Lost His Girlfriend Filming Warcraft appeared first on WIRED.

"If everyone is moving forward together, then success takes care of itself."  Henry Ford In the corporate world where deadlines are rampant, constant innovation is indispensable, workloads are mounting, and financial pressures are omnipresent, it’s no wonder the employees of many organisations feel as though they are disconnected from one another. Many employees have become disenfranchised or disengaged and as a consequence, it has led to poor business results and lost opportunities. In late 2010, the Corporate Leadership Council released its quarterly engagement trends report. Results indicated that only 22% of employees planned on staying in their current positions. Supplementing the point, 21.6% of all employees surveyed described themselves as highly disengaged. As a consequence and according to Gallup Management Journal, this disengaged and disconnected culture (in US-based organisations) is costing $300b per year in lost revenues alone. Is there a remedy for such calamitous organisational health? One budding approach that may help unify your team, your business unit and your organization to ultimately enrich and enhance your corporate culture, such that all employees feel as though they are moving forward as a connected group, is through the deployment and utilisation of an internal enterprise-wide micro-blogging platform. How Micro-Blogging Came To Be It was back in 1985 when communications researcher Friedhelm Hillebrand of Germany sat at a typewriter, tapping out words on a sheet of paper, trying to establish the ideal number of characters for a new point-to-point message service for cellular mobile telephones. He and his colleagues were devising a text-based communication system that would soon become ubiquitously known as texting. That magic number of characters became 160 and is now used pervasively across most mobile telephone devices for instant text messaging. The problem for any organisation, however, was that texting typically involved person-to-person exchanges and therefore wasn’t open to the entire spectrum of employees. Thus, in 1988, Jarkko Oikarinen of Finland developed IRC (Instant Relay Chat) after toying with the idea of distributed chatting through status messages using computers and internet protocol. Flash ahead in time to 2006 and the concept of IRC and person-to-person texting was significantly enhanced by Odeo Company General Manager Evan Williams and programmer Jack Dorsi of the United States, to become an open, internet-based, 140 character messaging, collaboration and status update service we now know as Twitter. This was the beginning of a new term; micro-blogging. PC Magazine defines micro-blogging as follows: A blog that contains brief entries about the activities of an individual or company. Created to keep friends, colleagues and customers up-to-date, small images may be included as well as brief audio and video clips. Moving Towards a Culture of Sharing Inside organisations, however, there is a dichotomous attitude at play. On the one hand, there are many employees utilising Twitter (or external micro-blogging) to connect, learn, share and inspire with external friends, family and even colleagues; on the other, organisations haven’t yet grasped how this invaluable technique might actually help with its internal culture, its objectives, and ultimately its business results. According to research published by McKinsey and Company in December, 2010, only 13% of companies felt as though micro-blogging was actually enhancing company culture. The encouraging sign, however, is that this sentiment is up from the 2009 data point of 10%. It’s incumbent upon senior leaders in the organisation to accurately and appropriately understand the tangible benefits of an internal micro-blogging service for its employees. If executives believe that Twitter or micro-blogging is either a waste of time or simply a fun outlet, they are missing the point entirely. This mindset might actually cause further damage concerning the number of disengaged employees that are on the rise inside today’s organisations. Micro-blogging, quite simply, should be thought of as a method in which organisations might flatten its hierarchy, increase the number and quality of relationships between employees, and speed up the exchange of knowledge, ideas and information within the business. Micro-blogging can also help mitigate missing connections between the field worker, the front line, the individual contributor, the manager, the director, the VP and the executive suite. By gaining access to peers that one might not otherwise know, the flow of organisational information and knowledge speeds up at a fraction of the time and cost. Micro-blogging, therefore, is truly humanising the pulse of the organisation yet driving business benefit. It’s a running commentary of what might have previously been discussed at the water cooler, the lunch table, or in the classroom; only now, the entire organisation has access to the dialogue and can take advantage both by listening and by contributing back. Exchanging Ideas; Improving Culture, Knowledge and Networks Employees typically have a voice when they are in team, project or manager-subordinate meetings. Occasionally, they might chime in when attending town halls, classroom sessions, and all-hands meetings. When micro-blogging is brought to fruition inside the organization, safely tucked within the corporate firewalls, the connection can be extremely powerful. Senior leaders have the ability to listen in and get a stronger sense of what is going on in the company be it related to employee opinions, ideas, issues, or opportunities. Employees not only can connect and be part of the dialogue; they can read the opinions and ideas of their peers as well as senior executives. "Micro-blogging isn’t an elephant sitting in the room," says Bert Sandie, Senior Director of Technical Excellence at Electronic Arts. "It’s something that epitomises tangible business value through the informal exchange of ideas and knowledge leading to improved results." Micro-blogging, by virtue of its definition, has an additional benefit. The actual micro-blog entries are short, concise and succinct. Most enterprise micro-blogging platforms limit the updates to 160 characters or less, similar to texting. This brevity forces everyone in the organisation to carefully think through their update or their response. Furthermore, due to the fact micro-blogging technology is an enterprise controlled application itself, (whether hosted internally or on the cloud) employees must log into the system, thus there is no chance for anonymity. In terms of increasing the engagement level and culture of an organisation, micro-blogging can provide several benefits, including: Greater understanding of what is actually going on in the organisation across teams or projects Personalizing and demystifying the aura of senior leaders Seeking opinion and exploring options before decisions are made Driving engagement and the feeling that everyone’s opinion is important Increasing social status of employees in business related matters Providing information that is timely through non-formal use Building trust amongst senior leaders and front-line workers in open, transparent ways Weak chance of disrupting already established workflows Risks and Pitfalls Enterprise micro-blogging can be viewed by employees and leaders as simply one more tool or one more task they need to make time for. Employees might already be suffering from information overload having to send, receive and process too many pieces of information through multiple channels. If micro-blogging is not introduced and positioned as a way in which to help save time, improve existing work processes, and to increase engagement within the organisation, it will undoubtedly be negatively viewed by employees. Jun Zhang, Jane Cody and Yuling Wu of Pitney Bowes introduced the "noise-to-value paradox" in 2010 as a possible impediment to micro-blogging adoption. If employees are unable to appropriately filter or make sense of various micro-blog streams, they may abandon the application due to a lack of context and full understanding. From a technology perspective, an organisation will have to decide whether to host the micro-blogging platform within its own firewall, or utilise the service of a hosted provider. The latter may cause some concern from the vantage point of the Chief Security Office. Furthermore, if the service is not accompanied by an enterprise-wide guideline and learning plan, some employees may not fully understand the security implications of what they share. Anything an organisation does to encourage intelligent and appropriate use of internal micro-blogging may help to counter security and ethical threats. In Summary Henry Ford obviously did not experience micro-blogging inside of the automobile company he helped to build. If still alive, he unquestionably would agree that micro-blogging helps increase bottom-line success through improved collaboration, engagement and a corresponding connected culture.  If everyone is in fact moving forward together, micro-blogging can be a useful tool and behaviour to assist with the end goal of becoming successful as united organisation. Originally published to EFMD Global Focus magazine. Related Posts:Micro-Blogging is Good for Leadership, Good for Your Culture#Top #5 #Reasons #To #Love #Hashtags #In #Your #Enterprise…6 Use Cases for Enterprise Micro-BloggingTweet Kings & Pretty Things (aka Micro-Blogging Habits)Let’s Rename Micro-blogging to Chatting

A massive collection of Marvel stars gathered at Comic-Con on Saturday, but it wasn’t for the the Marvel Studios panel—it was the 20th Century Fox one. The post 20th Century Fox Stole Some of Marvel’s Swagger for Comic-Con appeared first on WIRED.

It’s perhaps fair to say a majority of Microsoft Outlook email users might utilize the following adage if pressed into a decision: "I’ll give you my email when you pry it from my cold, dead hands!" People sure do love their email. The Radicati Group recently published findings suggesting in 2012, Microsoft Exchange (the back-end system that delivers the actual email to the Microsoft Outlook client) holds 53% market share of all enterprise email systems (powered by the Outlook client) yet by 2016 this will jump to 68% market share. This naturally got me thinking. It got me thinking because the conundrum with email is that its user driven in a one-to-one or a one-to-many flow. It’s not exactly collaboration, rather, its piecemealed, jagged communication. JP Rangaswami over at Confused of Calcutta had a rather brilliant observation recently in a post entitled, "On Collaboration", where he stated: E-mail has been the bane of collaboration, an unfit-for-purpose tool that has often been used to accentuate and enhance division and discord rather than collaboration. Yet for most people it is the standard tool of collaboration. This may have been so to begin with: a time when e-mails were short, when formality was conspicuous in its absence, when mail lists did not exist, when the cc and bc buttons didn’t exist, when there were no attachments. The first problem with e-mail is that it’s publisher-driven, the power is in the hands of the sender. For those enterprise clients and organizations who continue to use Exchange and Outlook, it begs the question … why isn’t SharePoint becoming part of both the back-end and the front-end? Why not merge communication with collaboration? Why does Microsoft continue to build SharePoint separate from Outlook and Exchange? Oh sure, you can synchronize content between SharePoint and Outlook, but that’s not what I’m after. I’d like to see communication become collaboration, and given the fact so many people are unwilling to give up their email, why not rebuild Outlook and Exchange such that it became a true collaborative platform (with all the social enterprise bells and whistles imaginable) and less about communication. (ok, it can keep email) Perhaps what I’m suggesting is to deprecate SharePoint in favour of a singular communication AND collaboration platform from Microsoft. Call it OutShare or ShareLook. I don’t care. Peeks, inline replies and a weather bar (allegedly features in Outlook 15) exacerbates my point. For those in Redmond, if you’re reading this, surely the SharePoint and Outlook/Exchange teams can work ‘collaboratively’ together to align forces and create a stunning singular product that incorporates this line of thinking. Maybe it’s in the cards for version 16? Related Posts:Review: SharePoint Conference 2011The Connected CultureStandalone LMS is Still Dead (rebutting & agreeing w/…The Hare, the Tortoise and the Jackass of Social HRVirtual Worlds in an Organization are not a Time Waster (and

Since 1967, the Mint 400, one of the continent's most grueling races, has been drawing some of motorsports' top names to the Nevada desert. The post The Off-Road Race So Wild You Barely Need Front Wheels appeared first on WIRED.