In the HBR article IT in the Age of the Empowered Employee, the author explains the concept of a “new contract to empower employees to solve the problems of empowered customers”, by identifying innovators:

In our new book, Empowered, we call these covert innovators HEROes — highly empowered and resourceful operatives. HEROes are those employees who feel empowered to solve customer problems and act resourcefully by using whatever technology they need to use. HEROes comprise 20% of the U.S. information workforce, but your industry may have many more or many fewer highly empowered and resourceful operatives.

The picture they use to explain this organization framework is a pyramid.

I don’t doubt their findings that about 20% of information workers act resourcefully and take the initiative in dealing with customers. I do take issue with the acceptance of the status quo and even supporting it with something like the HEROes model. That’s just not good enough, in my opinion, and shouldn’t be acceptable for any business leader.

The pyramid needs to flipped and organizations should develop ways to encourage innovation amongst 80% or more of the workforce, not the minority ...

Two recent events converged to spark some new thinking.

First, I had the pleasure of meeting up with Dave Gray, who I’d first met in Abu Dhabi where we both were presenting at a conference. Dave’s an interesting guy; he started XPlane as a firm to deliver meaningful graphics (which was recently bought by Dachis Group, and he’s recently been lead author on the book Gamestorming.

What Gamestorming is, I found out, is a really nice way to frame some common activities that help facilitate creative thinking.  Dave’s all over creativity, and took the intersection of game rules and structured activities to facilitate innovative thinking, and came up with a model that guides thinking about social interaction to optimize useful outcomes.  The approach incorporates, on a quick survey, a lot of techniques to overcome our cognitive limitations. I really like his approach to provide an underlying rationale about why activities that follow the structure implicitly address our cognitive limitations and are highly effective at getting individuals to contribute to some emergent outcomes.

I also happened to have a conversation with a lady who has been creating some local salons, ...

Do you pride yourself on your interviewing skills; on your ability to filter out your own prejudices, such as an ugly tie or the fact that you can’t stand blondes? Do you allow outside events to influence your interview evaluations?

If you answered ‘no’ a researcher in Canada has news for you.

Dr. Donald A. Redelmeier examined University of Toronto medical school admission interview reports from 2004 to 2009. After correlating the interview scores with weather archives, he determined that candidates who interviewed on foul-weather days received ratings lower than candidates who visited on sunny days. In many cases, the difference was significant enough to influence acceptance.

Wow. Bad weather just took on a whole new meaning.

These unconscious attitudes impact far more than interviewing; they color all our actions at work, at home and out in the world.

Being human means being vulnerable to unconscious and often illogic actions and reactions, but it also means finding a way to compensate for them.

How? By monitoring research, such as Redelmeier’s, and staying hyper-awareness of the foibles embedded in your ...

Greetings,

As most of you, I have had many different supervisors over the last 25+ years. During my time in the Navy, I got a new supervisor every 1-3 years because of rotations in and out of the organization. My experience during that time would be very similar to those of you reading today...it is fairly easy to segregate the great from the not-so-great leaders...that ratio is probably in some cases 1-to-100.

In my time as a Naval Intelligence officer, we had a tool that was called the "Alpha Roster." The Alpha Roster was something of a planning tool that listed all of the Naval Intelligence officers, their current command/unit, and when they were due to rotate to a new job. While its intended purpose was for career planning purposes...it also had another...it provided a way to track those not-so-great leaders to ensure you didn't end up even in the same geographic region with them again. In many respects, those these supervisors were in leadership positions...they were really my boss and not my leader.

How does this story relate to the topic? I think there is a significant difference between bosses and leaders...While your boss can be your leader...that ...

Mike Beltzner, director of Firebox, the much-loved web browser, lives in Toronto.  His company, and team of programmers, are 2,200 miles away in Silicon Valley.  He goes to meetings and conducts his daily business by "telepresence"--a robot sporting an image of his face mounted atop a mobile aluminum machine made by a company called Willow Garage that resembles an upright vacuum cleaner. By swiveling his camera eye back and forth, he can see the entire room and chats comfortably with the assembled team.

As an article by John Markoff in yesterday's New York Times makes clear, Beltzner is hardly alone:

Mobile robots are now being used in hundreds of hospitals nationwide as the eyes, ears and voices of doctors who cannot be there in person. They are being rolled out in workplaces, allowing employees in disparate locales to communicate more easily and letting managers supervise employees from afar. And they are being tested as caregivers in assisted-living centers.

The idea of having a boss that can roam around the office keeping tabs on what everyone is doing will obviously meet some resistance. People don't like feeling they are being spied upon. And, as alluring as ...