Should CHROs be in charge of innovation?

I argued in a recent article that the Chief People Officer needed to own the organization’s automation strategy. The idea was to contribute to the company’s growth capacity while compensating for the inevitable cost cutting that the first wave of IPA will bring about. However, he should not walk alone: to succeed in this endeavour, he should also leverage Talent and L&D strategies to favour innovation.

CEO agenda for 2014 : build the management dashboard for your soon-to-be digital organization

The digital technologies that are slowly invading each step in the value chain of our corporations will transform what it means to lead and to manage them. Incumbent leaders would do well to take a deep, hard look at how digital technologies are transforming their corporation and then understand what new breed of talent they should develop to master this revolution.

Explosive delegation

Why delegation has its dangers and a higher level of collaboration is the future of organizations

The context of context

Is context really king ? I remember reading that in one of Brian Solis' blogposts. Only it wasn't really true. Context might be the new lie. I have been thinking about the context of context ever since having that intuition during a Google+ conversation in the Conversation Community. I have tried to put my thoughts together, and it has proven more difficult than expected. 

Social is about context. About context beeing king and about technology being a context enhancing engine (from an individual point of view) as well as a context leveraging engine (from a business point of view). And therefore, at first sight, about a need or an opportunity for people and institutions alike to master context and act in real time. 

Only, after thinking about it, social is not solely about context: by changing the depth of our personal context, technological (and social) evolution is making the changing nature of responsibility and decision making visible.

Context has context and context needs to be managed, which is why Responsible Context Management might just become an imperative management practice in the next few years. 

The year we kill social business

Social Business (or #socbizz in Twitter) has reached buzzword status. If you want to live by the ambitions that were behind it, you probably need to kill it.

Visibility will kill management

The main issue with social technology in the corporate context is visibility. These technologies will show anyone anything, and that is terribly annoying to management, that has made a living on control and information brokerage.

And therefore management needs to evolve ... but not in the direction most managers fear. Really, we need more managers, not less. We need stronger skilled managers, able both to manage content and context, people and process, internal and external.

Because visibility does not come with talent. It's only visibility. And the capability for insight, that would allow any employee to act on this new-found access to most information / knowledge / people / issues is definitely not a given. On the contrary, it is talent that will be long in the making for most people, notwithstanding what the tenants of "generation flux" may say.

Social technologies should have us working on increasing the number of managers, I mean of people entrusted with the responsibility of achieving the company's mission.

Obviously, as Dominique Turcq hinted at in a recent post, it should also have leaders thinking on this mission and on the corporation as an institution. But that is another story.