Innovation
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Enterprise 2.0 Diagram
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I ran across this quite interesting and comprehensive e2.0 diagram and thought I’d share. I like how it’s organized with Actors, Technologies and Methods as part of the engine behind e2.0, but as usual I have a few comments. I probably would have phrased the Business Drivers differently – perhaps removing it as one of…
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The Stupidity of Crowds
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I have a lot of favorite bloggers. I think I’ve tipped my virtual hat over to Rob Millard quite often here, but I was going backwards in time reading some of his old posts and got to reflecting on an old post if his on the “stupidity of crowds.” We are, I am confident, soon…
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Innovation is an HR Problem
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I was reading an article in a recent McKinsey Quarterly on innovation. The Quarterly was interviewing Brad Bird from Pixar, and I was surprised how often employee engagement came up. Sure, Brad talked about collaboration and all the rest, but the engagement of the employee teams surprised me. In HR, we all know that employee…
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Where People Fit in the Toyota Way
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A while back I wrote a series on the Toyota Way. Toyota is unquestionably one of the top manufacturing companies in the world producing high quality products at a very low cost. At the center of this is the Toyota Production System (TPS) which formalizes production structures throughout the manufacturing process. However, behind the scenes…
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SystematicHR’s Thoughts for 2008
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I suppose that I do need to put together a list of things I’m especially interested in this year. Many of these are already trends. Some of these will never be, but are things perhaps only I am interested in. Other ideas might actually emerge in 2008. The War for Talent: People will realize that…
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Collaboration is Innovation
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When it comes to innovation, the myth of the lone genius dies hard. Most companies continue to assume that innovation comes from that individual genius, or, at best, small, sequestered teams that vanish from sight and then return with big ideas. But the truth is most innovations are created through networks — groups of people…
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Driving Innovation by Creating Culture
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This entire year I’ve been talking about topics that most HR people don’t talk about. Innovation and collaboration are often thought of as the domain of the business side. It’s really the guys in production or R&D to figure out how to innovate, or so we thing. We’re dead wrong. I finally found a whitepaper…
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Changing Management Culture to Improve Employee Creativity
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More and more of the literature that is out there (at least what I’m reading) is about innovation. Business thinkers are clearly over the fact that R&D, engineering and production is moving offshore. They realize that those tasks can go away, so long as we keep our edge where it counts – thinking up new…
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Organizing for Innovation
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You manage talent for a large organization that needs to innovate in order to stay competitive. How do you know what types of innovations are important and how do you attract the types of innovators that your organization needs? Some research coming out of Harvard has once again given us some answers: Based on in-depth,…
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HR Needs to Be Scared
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Why? Because we’re not doing our jobs and our bosses know it. Workforce Magazine published an article saying “Business Leaders Don’t See HR as Key to People Strategies” and Thomas Otter asks a bunch of us this question: “HR-HCM folks, does this concern you?” Absolutely yes it does concern me. And this isn’t the first…
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How Talent Networks Increase Profits
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Getting the right people and retaining them is the start of building a great workforce. Engaging them to your brand is the next step. But the true work of optimizing the workforce is going to be in defining how the individual talents collect and relate to each other to produce value. Talent is the scarce…
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Evolving from Knowledge Management to Innovation Networking
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Knowledge management was all the rage a decade ago. People realized the need to maintain institutional and intellectual capital as employees filtered into an organization, created new knowledge, and then often left the organization leaving little trace of the knowledge they developed and didn’t share effectively. But knowledge management didn’t really take off as a…
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Does Web 2.0 Suck?
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Michael thinks web 2.0 sucks. Actually, he doesn’t, he’s the biggest user of new technologies I know. But enterprise users have been slow to adopt the technology. I talked about capturing collaboration networks in HR using web 2.0 technologies, but take a look at Sean Rehder’s excellent rebuttal in the comments section. There are good…
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Innovation in Human Capital Management
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In my existential search for meaning in HR, I’ve tried for a very long time to understand what HR could really do for the business. Certainly talent and our ability to contribute to directing talent’s growth through talent management is very important to our organization’s viability and competitiveness for the future. But this doesn’t change…
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HR Strategy – What Really Matters?
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Harvard Business Review recently published that “Most traditional HR performance metrics – such as employee turnover rates, average time to fill open positions, and total hours of training provided – don’t predict organizational performance.” ((Bassi, Laurie and McMurrer, Daniel, March 2007. “Maximizing Your Return on People.” Harvard Business Review. Retrived from http://www.hbr.com.)) Instead, they correlated…
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Redefining Innovation
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The American Heritage Dictionary simply defines innovation as “The act of introducing something new.” ((American Heritage Dictionary. Retrieved from http://www.dictionary.com on April 3, 2007.)) ZDnet has a pretty nice CIO interview series. In one of them, Steve Cooper, the CIO of the Red Cross talks about innovation and some of their hurdles from the Hurricane…
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What Innovation Looks Like (really)
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Image information in footnote ((Research and node layout by Kevin Boyack and Dick Klavans; data from Thompson ISI; graphics & typography by W. Bradford Paley. Commissioned and partially supported by Katy Borner and the Places and Spaces: Mapping Science exhibition. Copyright (c) 2006 W. Bradford Paley, all rights reserved. (But you may print a version…
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Web 2.0 Networks and HR
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This is an increasingly featured topic on this site. Innovation networks and collaboration networks are of great interest to the business community because it ties together how work and product actually gets done. Sure we have our formal organizational hierarchies, and we have process flow charts that rout our activities to each other, but the…
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Innovation Software and HR
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Do I ever get sick of being the only one who talks about innovation and preaching that HR should be involved? Sometimes I feel like I’ve spent the last 6 months spewing on about collaboration and innovation and how HR should be part of the lead for figuring how that stuff works. After all, it’s…
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Real Lesson From Despair.com: Get To Work
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You aren’t being paid to believe in the power of your dreams. ((Despair.com)) Somewhere I needed to write one of these despair.com pieces and disagree with the message. Sometimes, we are paid to believe in the power of our dreams. I’ll take myself as an example. If you read enough of systematicHR.com, you’ll have noticed…