Successful Workplace

Once again, the pitfalls of using social media rears it’s head and someone pays the price. This time it’s not an internal department falling asleep at the wheel a la Burger King when it was hacked but something a little more worrying. Paris Brown is Britain’s first youth police and crime commissioner, a position she […]

Living in a world where customer experience is the ultimate goal I sometimes wonder whether organizations lose a bit of internal focus and forget about the employee experience. Going from good to great to pretty shocking I’ve been involved in many changes programmes where the directive from on high is to increase cost efficiency, process […]

My mother is getting her knees replaced this week. Both of ‘em. She and my father are true globetrotters. They’ve hiked the Inca Trail to Machu Picchu, boated in the Amazon Basin, visited a Mount Everest base camp, and spanned latitudes from the Svalbard Islands to Tierra del Fuego. It’s not often that a son […]

This post was inspired by the article “You want to be fired from your job this year“ that appeared on Successful Workplace on Monday. Having been through a ‘job transition’ several years ago, I wanted to share a few lessons that got me through a tough time, and doubtless will come in handy in the future. Your […]

What if being fired is a core component of innovation? What if being fired is the only way to get you out of your going-nowhere job? This is not a “Top 10 reasons…” list. I hate lists. This is simply an explanation of why you should be begging to be fired this year. Moreover, I’m […]

“Daddy, are you still at work?” A simple enough question.  My children understand that if I am in my office, or I walk into the house after a business trip and am on the phone that I may still be at work. Have you noticed that the term “I am at work” has become a meaningless […]

Once again Twitter proved its title as the ‘pulse of the planet’ when British entertainment retailer HMV employees took control of the official @hmvtweets Twitter account and livetweeted what they called their “mass execution” . The account of 60 employees being fired all at once hit the twitter stream briefly before being removed by the […]

The following is a guest post by Toby Beresford. Toby is founder of Leaderboarded.com a tool to create multi-variable leaderboards from both business and social data. He can be reached at @tobyberesford. At the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805, a smaller British fleet routed a larger  French one, destroying 22 French ships without a single British vessel […]

Sometimes change is so gradual yet so ubiquitous that we don’t see the enormous implications of what’s really happened until somebody says it in a new way. I recently had such an experience when I read Google’s Michael Jones on How Maps Became Personal in the Atlantic.  A lot of the ideas in this piece jumped […]

Watching the Enterprise Social trends emerge has raised interesting questions, not only in terms of the new technology as an enabler but how the enterprise makeup is going to look and operate in the future. Having been involved in many transformation programs, it always amazes me to see the same top-down hierarchical business operating models applied […]

The following is a guest post by Richard McMunn, founder of How2become. McMunn established the company in 2005 while working as a Fire Officer for Kent Fire & Rescue Service. Since writing his first book on how to become a firefighter, Richard has gone on to author various titles spanning across multiple careers . The […]

If you missed it, Forrester’s Nigel Fenwick summed up his view of 2013 as the Year of Digital Business. He goes straight to the point in saying that digital business involves both the communication evolution from signal fires to Twitter and the social business revolution (note the word business) for bringing collaboration and innovation in an […]

Do we have a way to recognize talent or are we so caught up in what we want that we overlook the genius in our own organizations? One of our favorite stories: A guy is driving around the back woods of Montana and he sees a sign in front of a broken down shanty-style house: […]

The following is a guest post by Sean Conrad. Sean is a Certified Human Capital Strategist and Senior Product Analyst at Halogen Software. For more of Sean’s insights on talent management best practices and creating a coaching culture, read his posts on the Halogen Software blog. Watch out!  One of the most dreaded times of the year […]

Following on from the recent blog Why the CIO hates Christmas.  So in the cheery spirit of Christmas, I thought I’d turn my attention to the COO or Operations Director: The one who keeps the wheels turning, no matter how much grit is thrown into the innermost workings. So why do COOs hate Christmas?  It […]

We’re about to enter the holiday stretch for many parts of the world. This is a great time to look at vacation and how it is evolving as a part of our work. After all, do we work to live or live to work? Cogs in a machine Vacation is a legacy of the Industrial […]